The High Cost of Living.

In my household I do a majority of the grocery shopping.  It is mind blowing how much the cost of food can fluctuate in a week.  Then when my hard working wife gets a day off and comes with me, I can't stand to be next to her when she flips out over the prices of food.  She is the kind that will actually walk up to the guy stocking milk and ask, "Do you seriously expect people to pay $4 a gallon for milk?".  Needless to say the poor milk boy is at a loss for words.  So it got me to researching.  In 1987 (roughly a quarter century ago) milk sold for $1.59 a gallon.  In 1986 bacon was $1.69 a pound, today you shell out four and a half bucks for a pack of bacon that is only 12 ounces of meat. In 1996 you could still buy ground meat for under a dollar a pound.  Today that same ground meat is running about four bucks a pound.  And my personal favorite cut of beef, the rib eye steak, some places want eight or nine dollars a pound.  In 1987 it was only $3.88 a pound.

All of these stats come from a great website called http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/ .  It's a great site to look at the cost of things from the 1920's till now.  I was born in the early '70's so everything about the '80's has a familiar feel to it.  The website has everything from food, to housing, and gas. Which brings me to my least favorite thing to pay for, GAS!  When my grandparents were alive they loved to talk about the good ole days when gas was a nickel a gallon.  Then came the oil embargo of the late '70's.  I remember waiting in line on side the road for hours to pay an outrageous price of $1.35 a gallon of gas in 1978.  By the time I started driving in 1986 gas had gone down to $.92 a gallon.  Now some twenty seven years later we constantly flirt with $4 for a gallon of gas.  Here is the catch, at the turn of the millennium (2000) gas was only 2 bucks.

So it begs the question, has everything doubled in cost in the last thirteen years?  Surprisingly, the answer is no!  Yes overall prices have risen but that only accounts for half of the increase in prices that we pay for essentials of life.  Where does the other half come from you may ask?  In a word, taxes.  In the great state of Louisiana, of the $3.42 a gallon of gas you paid for today, $0.46 a gallon was in taxes.  If you needed roughly 20 gallons of gas you paid roughly 10 bucks to our fine government.  Think that's bad the people of Illinois pay $0.63 per gallon of gas in taxes.  If you average it out from state to state, taxes make up roughly 30 to 40 percent of the total of your cost of gas.  The same is true for the food we buy.  In Louisiana, depending on your individual parish, you pay between 7.9% and 10.4% in food sales taxes.  I know ten percent of your food bill to pay for the wonderful conveniences of our great government doesn't sound like much, but when you start adding up all the other taxes it gets old real quick.  There are payroll taxes, income taxes (both state and federal), social security taxes, property taxes, and taxes on the money you haven't spent.  Then on top of that you have to pay for licensing, registrations, and government required miscellaneous anything and everything.  We are being taxed into oblivion.  Why did we start a rebellious revolution in 1774?

So I want to ask a serious question.  Do you think that the taxes we pay daily are worth all the amenities given to us by the government?  Are highways and bridges worth the high cost of gas? Is the amount of support your local government hands out worth the percentage of sales taxes?  Is your local education system living up to the property tax you pay?  Are the social, welfare, and other services rendered by the federal government equal to your weekly income tax?  Please, do tell!