How many here could afford to live if all prices doubled?

[Mairead]

The reason given would be the knock-on effects of fuel-price rises (there's a satirical song about price-gouging, 'Honest Is All Out Of Fashion', that comes from the time of the Napoleonic Wars. It has one of the gougers 'explaining' their profiteering by saying 'There is a French war / and the cows have no grass'.)

So if all prices--rent/mortgage, heating, electricity, food, internet access, clothing, everything--doubled, could you get by? If not, what would you do?

[flordehinojos]

1. move to the I-95 underpass with the other homeless.

[shadowknows69]

27. ditto

or embark on that bank robbery career I always considered.

[Coventina]

2. Fuggedaboutit

We'd be in deep doo-doo.

[etherealtruth]

3. I'm already renovating a card board box

[SouthernDem2004]

21. Better upgrade why you can. The fancy slick water proof jobs need

oil for the coating I think. Buy now before the box market skyrockets!

[leftofthedial]

4. I can't afford to live now

[ohio_liberal]

9. Neither can I

:(

[Tace]

5. I'll Be Using My Camping Gear

[seemslikeadream]

6. People are living WAY beyond their means

and are completely unaware of it. Property value = ponzi scheme

[dweller]

7. prices have already gone up

33% or more on many items. . . and that's just my gathering of regular items (groc. etc.) . Or they have been downsized 25% + while the price remains the same.

me, i'm moving into my VW camper, but probably can't afford the gas by then.

dp

[Mairead]

12. It was the going up that made me think of it

The special easier-on-the-kidneys food I buy for my elderly cat went up about 20% since last time; all the grocery prices have gone up; I just filled up my car's gas tank again at the same CitGo station as per usual and the price has gone up another 15% (how long before crooks are syphoning tanks in the middle of the night?)

[elehhhhna]

14. Sailboat, baby. We should invest in sailboats. And meet some sailors,

or take some lessons.

I now christen thee the "DU Dinghy". All aboard!

People all over the world...
Join IN! Get on the Dinghy!
The Dinghy...

[Donailin]

34. the first time I noticed the downsizing

was about three or four years ago when ice cream, which used to be sold in half gallon containers strated being packaged in 1.75 quarts, and the price went up by a buck or so. To this day, I will not buy ice cream in the decptive package.

[knitter4democracy]

45. Did the same with yarn.

They switched to metric and used the smaller size. Yarn used to be sold by the ounce, and now it's sold by the gram. Instead of 4 ounces of yarn in a skein, now it's 100 grams, which is only 3.5 ounces and fewer yards. Knitters and crocheters here are still mad about it.

[SoCalDem]

51. don't forget 3-lb cans of coffee with 33 oz

:(

[SammyWinstonJack]

8. Barely would be able too.

Thanks a bunch you 'VALUE VOTING' bush** zombies!

[elehhhhna]

10. Mort wouldn't double but beyond that the monthly nut is approx.

2K (including EVERYTHING -- gas, food, utilities, 'net, cable, etc.)

4K plus our smallish mort would hurt BAD.

[Mairead]

15. Don't bet on the mort not doubling--do you really think they couldn't buy

a law letting them do it?

[elehhhhna]

17. as my middle-schooler gals say: FINE, then! I'd walk away.

I'd walk away. Though, no, they will not/ cannot pass a law doubling one's mort payment.

[Double T]

11. Corporate America is raping the majority of the population with their...

price gouging for every commodity. The time has come to take back our country from the Corporate Rapists, The Wall Street Crew, and the Political Neocons. The "New World Order" must be brought to an end!!!!

[knitter4democracy]

46. Don't blame smaller corporations, though.

I'm the prez of a small corporation (trying to open up a yarn shop this fall), and my prices will be based on what I have to pay. I would like to simply keystone, but with shipping going higher all the time, I'll have to go higher than that. Many of the companies I'll be buying from are small American companies with their costs going higher. The only ones really profiting from all of this are the oil companies.

[HawkerHurricane]

13. well...

Mortgage stays the same for me (fixed rate). And so does health care (veteran's benefits). Heating isn't a big deal (SoCal). So, by sitting in the dark, only driving to work, I could probably survive. I wouldn't like it, though.

[SuffragetteSal]

16. adjustments in lifestyle

'Be Prepared' - old girl scout motto I keep close in the back of my mind. I already have a nice garden providing many fruits and vegetables and being a vegetarian helps too. Walking to work or taking a bicycle.Going back to a simple way of living. It just might do some people good...

[getmeouttahere]

18. If my rent was doubled, no way....

if it was just the price of everything else, let's just say I would have almost no discretionary income, and I'm sure that would be the case for millions

[Democracy White]

19. I wouldn't be able to live

if the prices continue to go up. I can barely live now. I'm on disability and unless they give me more money I will probably be out on the street.

Dee

[B Calm]

20. Cost me 80 dollars to fill my pickup and boat with gas yesterday..

Been sitting at home and not going fishing as much this year. The price of gas is really tearing up the economy.

I hope the idiots who voted for an oil president think that it would mean cheap gas are feeling pretty damn stupid!

[NMMNG]

22. Doubled?

Let's just say, cable/internet/all other non-critical items would have to go. I'd be living on canned veggies, beans, rice and water. I'd probably have to move.

Things would really suck. :thumbsdown:

[Not_Giving_Up]

23. Well, I'm already living on unemployment and food stamps right now

I guess I could make it, if they also doubled.

[SoCalDem]

24. I've got news for you.. In my lifetime they have tripled (or more)

When I was 20 something..gas was 30-40CENTS a gal..bread was 4 loaves for $1.00..a gallon of milk was 99cents..a BRAND new car cost under 4K..a muscle car..Rent for a 2 bedroom brick house on about an acre cost us $100 a month..Chicago to Hawaii roundtrip with hotel and car for a week..under $400..

I could go on..but you get the drift.. prices will only go up.. Once a business can sell for a high price, why would they want to lower it?

[sandnsea]

25. It's horrifying, isn't it

And minimum wage has barely doubled, and not even that in most places. I was calculating monthly payments for property I'm thinking of purchasing, I had no idea a few points could make such a drastic different in the monthly payment. Now I'm afraid to buy because interest could go up just a few percent and the only thing that could possibly offset it is for purchase prices to plummet and I'd never be able to sell. What if it went back to 15%? If interest doen't kill me, inflation will if I do nothing. Then put cost of living and gasoline increases on top of that. It's all fucked up, damned Republicans.

[Mairead]

26. Not as newsy as you'd think :-)

...since I'm 5-10 years older than you :evilgrin: I remember those prices. I also remember the wages of the time.

We've been living on the fruits of plunder for a long time. Wages have generally at least followed if not kept up with prices so the periods of crushing disparity have been brief. I'm really asking: what happens if the party's over as from now?

We have a societal structure--suburbs, cars, commuting to jobs, poor insulation, lots of electrical and gasolene powered appliances built abroad cheaply and shipped here cheaply--built on the availability of 'free' energy. Yet every year, people not much older than us die because the energy isn't 'free' enough to do them any good. They freeze or die of heat stress because they can't afford the price of enough energy to change their personal environment and we've constructed a society that prevents them going anywhere else.

My question is: what if the wealthy elites decide to raise prices but because of globalism there's no way to force them to also raise wages? How many people here will be able to go on living as opposed to sinking to a bare-existance level? How many will still be able to post at DU? Who will be able to communicate? What will that do to the ability to resist?

[SoCalDem]

50. Yep.. wages were low then, BUT as a percentage of what it cost to live

we were OK. I can still remember a few months after we were maried (1970)..my husband got a raise and was going to be making $900 a month...added to MY $300 a month, we figured we were on easy street, making $1200.00 a month. Our rent was $100.00.(utilities included) our car payment for our GTO was $83.00. Our car insurance was $20 a month..We had a B&W sylvania tv with lead wire attached to our neighbor's fence for an antenna..TWO baskets full of groceries cost under $50.. we paid about $6 a week to do laundry, and we ate out about 4 times a week (at NICE restaurants)..

We WERE better off... we just didn't know it then:(

[KharmaTrain]

28. My Late Mother Said "What This Country Needs Is Another Depression"

Yep...if all the prices went so high that people couldn't afford, this economy would collapse ala the Depression. Millions would be out of jobs, their little money would have less value and you found other ways to get by.

My mother grew up in the Depression and said that while it was a tough time...and she had it real rough being the child of immigrants...but it also brought out a sense of community that she never saw again. People would take a genuine concern about watching over a suffering or sick neighbor. They'd share clothes, skills, tears and more...what you couldn't buy, you found a way to get through other means.

The biggest losers of the prices doubling would be corporate America. Not that their greed has no limits, but it would destroy the consumer market for years and throw many of these companies into bankruptcy. The Fed and big banks have been playing games for decades with defered debt and other creative financing to fuel the "consumer economy" we live in now. The growing debt bomb is what will bring a lot of those high flyers back to earth.

[Mairead]

35. So you reckon it'd be a good thing? Short term, long, or both?

I'm asking because of the 'then and now' differences. We weren't a society of suburbs and shopping malls, gutted cities, no factories, and corporate farms--those were changes that have occurred since the end of WW2.

[KharmaTrain]

36. I'm Kinda Mixed...

Since I know who gets hurt when the economy collapses and the hardships it creates. But I also see so many who struggle from paycheck to paycheck as it is and falling further behind. How worse can it get?

Of course the idealist would like to see the large corporates cut down to size...stripped of their special legislation and corporate welfare and a true free enterprise/free market system in its place. You have to burn the village to save it. I'm not into socialism or state manipulation...if anything, the opposite. It would give smaller companies and individuals the opens (while picking up the pieces) and we move forward from there.

At least I can dream...

Peace

[Silverhair]

29. If EVERYTHING doubles, then wages would be doubled too.

The result would be nearly the same, except that my income tax bracket would be higher.

I think you meant to ask, "If everything except your pay doubled..."

[Mairead]

30. um, read it again? I specified PRICEs, not 'everything'

for precisely the reason you mention.

[Silverhair]

37. Wages ARE prices. They are the price of labor. NT

[Mairead]

38. I'm not interested in playing that kind of game, thanks. (nt)

[Silverhair]

39. Have you ever hired a plumber?

How about paid someone to mow your lawn? Fix your car? Cut your hair?

In those, and similar type transactions you are not buying a physical product, but are purchasing a service. You are purchasing labor.

It isn't a game, but it is a part of economic reality.

[Kathy in Cambridge]

43. What about firefighters? Office workers? Engineers?

yes, some folks are independent and can set their prices according to the market. But most folks work for the Man, and are paid accordingly.

Since you are an expert on the employment situation, you may be interested in this link about current employment growth:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/7/10/103040/382

[Silverhair]

44. Ultimately, they set their prices too, just not a quickly.

If the pay for (fill in the job) is not sufficient at (fill in the place) the workers will tend not to take that job which will cause a decrease in the number of qualified appliciants and greater personell loss among veteran workers, until the management is forced to do something to attract new hires or collapse from lack of people. It may be pay scale, working conditions improvement, or many other things, but they will have to respond with a better deal for the workers.

BTW - Do you maintain that only liberal arts majors use "critical thinking"? I would maintain that science majors certainly need critical thinking skills also. I can't imagine a math person without critical thinking skills. After all, math is pure logic.

[Mairead]

52. Now why does that sound like you work for the Cato Institute?

It's a lovely theory, but every working person's experience tells us that it's not so. Because if it were so, then wages would not have stagnated or fallen in purchasing power through the past 30 years. Who would take less money for their work, if they had some other choice? Would you? I wouldn't have.

(And I don't think you'd have a hope of supporting the idea that maths are 'pure logic', either, unless by 'logic' you simply mean 'rule'. Maths have nothing much to do with the workaday, syllogistic meaning of 'logic'.)

[Silverhair]

53. You have to consider the total number of competitors for a job.

As transportation and communication costs come down, (An international phone call 30 years ago was horribly expensive.) foreign workers have been able to enter the American job pool without leaving their country. So there are more people competing for the same job. That places a downward pressure on those types of jobs that they can do. An engineer in India can now do work for a company in Kansas, so the engineer in Kansas has a more difficult time.

And many costs have come down. Look at the prices for phone calls. Greatly down. When I was a child, a loooong time ago, long distance calls were so expensive that they weren't made unless someone was dying or dead and the family had to gather around. Being a passenger on a plane so expensive it wasn't considered by anybody we knew. A color TV back then was around $500.00, at a time when minimum wage was $1.00/hr. Now you can get a far better color TV for under $100.00 Prices for electronics are dropping rapidly. Some prices are indeed rising, but many are also falling.

The math comment was unrelated to the first paragraph of my previous post. It related to a different discussion with the poster I was answering. I thought that should have been obvious from the wording.

[Mairead]

54. "And many costs have come down."

But not the ones that are basic to life. And that's the point. For the person who can't afford housing or utilities, it wouldn't matter a damn if they were giving away a free telly for every room, or letting people phone overseas gratis.

If you can't meet your basic human needs, then nothing else matters.

Whence my original question: what happens if this is the end; if the corporate bosses decide that they'll simply raise prices and keep them there, blaming oil price increases (or, to folk-process Martin Carthy's update of that 200-y.o. song:

'No wonder that butter's near a fiver a pound
See the rich corporate farmers how they ride up and down
You ask them the reason, they'll say: "O alas,
Oil prices are high and the cows have no grass."

And absentee landlords, I must bring 'em in
Their rents need two jobs and they think it no sin
Their ceilings fall in, and the walls run with slime
But there's nowhere that's cheaper, so we daren't mind')

[Silverhair]

55. Go back to my original response.

I said that you had misstated the question. What you really meant was: "What if the cost of everything doubled, but your own wages didn't."

In my case, there have always been, and will always be, people who want to gamble. I have been a professional poker player for many years. A doubling of prices will simply mean higher stakes for the same buying power. As long as my mind is sharp, I will be OK. If my mind goes, I hope my body does too, as a life without a mind is too terrible for me to contemplate.

[Mairead]

57. " I have been a professional poker player for many years"

How nice for you. You're self-employed--and as such are in the minority, which is the point that Kathy made.

Since you seem anxious to assert the primacy of your particular --even unique-- interpretation of what I said, I'll leave you to it.

[Kathy in Cambridge]

60. The attitude is a familiar one

if you get my drift...

[seabeyond]

31. i could get by for a couple reasons

i am not a spender so i would be able to cut back on the utilities, food and gas easily in life. also the extra things in life i wouldnt have a need for. i could greatly reduce my budget if there was a need. plus i do have money going into savings, so i have extra money.

a bitch it would be though. but i could do it

i too have thought about this.

as things go up, i just automatically cut other things to balance out my budget. just the way i am

[Donailin]

32. dear God, no.

but it looks like we're headed towards that end. I imagine the majority of americans couldn't either -- and that's when the revolution will occur.

[gollygee]

33. I'm not worried about the mortgage, but yes i think we'll be faced with

the rest of that.

We hardly *need* to drive at all so we can save money there.

We've talked about getting a Franklin stove. We have tons of wood around here.

Food will be a problem. I'm learning how to garden and preserve food.

And I made a solar oven and am working on making a better one.

[amazona]

40. I've had my income drop by half before, you go on living

The standard of living changes and you do without stuff, but you go on living. I did without air conditioning -- the equivalent of your doing without heating, I suppose -- for several years. You don't need to buy clothes. You just wear the old ones. I can get free internet access for an hour every day at my local public library. At one point I had a food budget of $30 a month. Now I'm addicted to crockpot beans and homemade pasta sauce.

Sure, you get by. What choice do you have?

[MountainLaurel]

41. Housing in DC Metro HAS doubled

And more over the past two years. A condo that cost $93500 in September 2003 sold for $211K in April of this year. And salaries sure the hell haven't doubled -- you're lucky if you got a 3 percent COLA each year.

[candy331]

42. Hell I couldn't afford to die at that rate, just go outside and lay on the

ground for the vultures to devour what would be left of me.

[Vinca]

47. Your post isn't far fetched at all. Prices on everything are going up!

I'm especially worried about heating oil prices next winter. It's got me thinking about self-sufficient housing. We're giving serious thought to building an earth ship. They need little heat, get electricity from solar and can be built with a greenhouse in front to grow some veggies.

[distantearlywarning]

48. We could do it.

But just barely. No extra if the car broke down or cats got sick or anything. But we live in a low cost of living area and we are very frugal. For instance, less than 25% of our income goes towards rent. We save more a month than we spend on rent.

I know most other people out there don't do that, so they would be screwed.

[Sapphire Blue]

49. Couldn't afford housing, so I'd go camp out on the WH lawn. Seriously.

[CitrusLib]

56. If everything doubled? Not a chance. My sister and I have already

discussed this actually. We'd probably combine our households (we fortunately live in the same neighborhood) and carpool. Haven't broken the news to our husband's yet. We'll cross that bridge when we have to. :-D

[Mairead]

58. Not a chance that they'll double, or that you'll get by if they do?

[CitrusLib]

59. If everything doubled, no chance we could get by.

Not without seriously dipping into the savings and retirement monies.