I was chatting with Daily Post editor Bill Hudson over the weekend, and I happened to mention that the price of SPAM has gone up noticeably over the past few months.
Also the price of onions.
What’s going on?
I mean, I always expect the price of gas to go up, but really… how can SPAM possibly cost more? Isn’t it just made out of leftover animal parts?
Mr. Hudson suggested that the price of nearly everything is going up. We’re suffering from classic inflation. Or so he said.
(He also said I should stop eating SPAM, if I wanted to live long enough to collect Social Security.)
To prove his point about inflation, he later emailed me this graph.
I wrote back that it looked like we elected the wrong President, because obviously things went to hell right after Joe Biden’s inauguration in January 2021.
Mr. Hudson had a different theory. He said I was only looking at the increase after January 2021, but I needed to look at the decrease in March 2020.
It all depends on how you look at things.
I could see his point. Inflation was pretty normal in January and February 2020, while the news about COVID was filtering itself into our nightmares. But then, when people really started to get sick, in April and May, we had the best inflation rate probably ever in the history of the United States.
The inflation rate in the month of May was, like, 0.1%. That number is almost too small to imagine.
Yes, okay, we had to wear masks, and it was impossible to find toilet paper. But the price of SPAM actually went down a few pennies. (I notice these kinds of things.)
But now, at the rate things are going, the $20 bill in my wallet will be worth only $18 by next summer.
Would I rather have a real $20 bill, actually worth $20? Even if I had to wear a mask?
That’s not an easy question to answer, but when I really think about it… yes, I will wear the mask.
The only problem, as I see it, is how to start another pandemic. A fair number of scientists, who are a lot smarter than me, think the COVID pandemic originated at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, China. They didn’t just sell seafood. They also sold bats.
Obviously, if we want another global pandemic (and another chance at a 0.1% inflation rate) we need more seafood markets, that sell bats.
That’s probably not practical here in Pagosa Springs, even though I would be first in line, to volunteer to eat a bat.
We have lots of bats here, but the seafood part would be a problem.
Maybe the market could be in Washington, DC.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.