My rant today is the wage and price spiral, one trying to outdo the other. Back in the 70s and 80s you had to have a good paying job to make $10.00 an hour, that is minimum wage now. The past few years prices and wages seem to take some drastic jumps, driven mainly by the oil companies. They were actually bidding against each other to get tradesmen to work for them. Some were making $70.00 to $100.00 per hour, make no wonder oil products went through the roof. Nobody wins in these situations, but there are many losers. People that retire and are on fixed incomes, they could live on their pension when inflation was only two per cent a year, but now, even though the official inflation rate is still around two per cent, but that is not what I see when I go to buy any thing, it's more like two percent a month. Now that prices got driven up, mainly by wages, nobody can afford to buy anything. So now comes the big layoff, people are losing houses, cars, etc., things that they couldn't really afford in the first place, but bought them anyway because they were making highly inflated wages to pay them off with, but when you lose your job, there goes you fat pay cheque.

About the only thing you can get cheap now is music. When we were making $10.00 an hour, we though nothing about paying $10.00 for a cassette tape, but now we baulk at paying $15.00 for a CD, actually most people want their music for free. I can remember paying 50 cents for a gallon of gas, right now I'm paying 99 cents a liter, 4 1/2 litres to a gallon. The price I paid to build my house in the 70s can't get me a good car now. Maybe this recession is a good thing, it might bring wages under control, which will bring prices under control, so people on fixed incomes don't have to choose between eating or heating their homes.