Lean and hungry times

Lean and hungry times

Boy, talk about a turnaround. I’d bet Lazarus wasn’t this surprised when the Lord brought him back to life after he’d been dead long enough to have developed an odor problem.

If I hadn’t read it with my own two eyes, I certainly would never have believed Pike County’s projected $3 million dollar deficit could become a $2.1 million dollar surplus.

I don’t know how this came about, but I’m seriously tempted to ask whoever worked this miracle to take a look at my financial situation. A similar turnaround might even allow me to eat some this coming year.

No, seriously, while one facet of Pike County government finds it may have a little breathing room, another one finds itself mired down and digging itself deeper in as it tries to extricate itself. That would be the Pike County Board of Education whose free lunch program is facing a $600,000 deficit.

By the way, I’m tempted almost beyond endurance to make something of the fact that a “free lunch” program is the one involved; something about “no such thing as a free lunch”, but I think I can resist.

The one thing pretty much everyone could say to the Board of Education is “We feel your pain.” Anyone who’s been on the inside of a grocery store knows exactly how Sabrina Thompson, the BOE’s director of food service, feels.

In fact, when I make my pilgrimage to the supermarket, I’m like the suitor in an old poem who visited the girl he’d fallen in love with. Our hero tried standing on one foot and then the other and he couldn’t tell which made him more miserable.

That’s because we’re being hit by a double whammy; the ever-rising price of food, and the cost of the stuff you need to buy in order to get to the store and back again, what the local comics call the motion lotion, or gasoline.

It almost seems like there’s a race between two sets of workers at the supermarket to see which can set prices the highest; those in the store and those who work at the gas pumps.

Of course it isn’t the fault of anyone in the supermarkets: This is the work of Wall Street speculators. Yes, the group who brought us such enjoyable phenomena as the housing bubble has now moved into the commodities market and is raising havoc AND food prices worldwide.

We’ve already noted their work in the higher gas prices we’ve been paying: Because of their handiwork, gas prices have gone up by 40% over the last few months; but the so-called commodity index funds have poured some $400 billion into commodity markets, and we are all now seeing the result of that.

It’s not like this is the first time speculators have been involved in commodity markets, but in order for everything to work out well, speculators’ involvement should be limited to 30% of market activity with commercial traders taking up the remaining 70%.

According to an article on cnn.com by Better Markets President Dennis Kelleher, this has now been reversed: Speculators now control 70% of commodity markets with commercial traders getting just 30%.

This, according to Kelleher, is the result of “investment banks creating and selling ‘commodity index funds’ that gamble on, and usually drive up, food and energy prices.”

See? And we all thought it was just our imaginations working overtime.