There are, I suppose, "reasons" if you're into that kind of thing, but it sure feels (and this is how current events and history work now, primarily in feels) of a piece with spikes in gasoline and all kinds of other trivialities like food for humans that have made the cost of living a crisis all across the world for seemingly unrelated reasons. Certainly, for example, the war in Ukraine can't affect California half a world away as much or as readily as it has the United Kingdom. But it has to be more complicated than that as the UK has sloughed its way into an object lesson for what happens when you try to base an economy on xenophobia and the intoxicating perfume of the smell of your own flatulence. It's got a long and distinguished imperial pedigree, that's why it's flatulence and not that other peasant word, but the result is you have spend part of your intellectual and emotional energy now remembering to call your self-imposed trap a hot-box instead of a Dutch oven because the intellectual property rights don't transfer across the hard borders of the EU.
Object lessons only matter if people bother to learn from them and I honestly wonder if we're capable of that here. In some ways it feels as though we're immune to some of the forces at work as the American voting public would never, in any set of circumstances, endorse or condone a program of austerity, the kind that has de-incentivized investment in economic growth in the UK and other places that have struggled. As much as THE DEFICIT is a dumb bugbear that regularly crawls out of the infested mouths of those yawping into the political discourse from the right over here, that's the same faction who would stab their own mothers in the chest with a brand new laser-guided bayonet if they suggested cutting Dollar One from a comically unjustifiable defense budget. In this country, we pay for things. Never the correct things, but the cash gets laid out. Austerity is for socialists and poors. Belt-tightening and boostrap-pulling are related feats.
But I can't use an F-22 or a new football stadium, the only things that reliably get public money in this country, to heat my house,* so I'm stuck with my stupid bill from Southern California Gas. I can take some comfort, I suppose, in the governor trying to spark an investigation into price gouging on my behalf, but sparks and natural gas aren't normally a great combination. The post-consequences era we've been living in since about November 2016 is built specifically on the denial of hope as a resource, so we're stuck having to turn to more material ones, like the numbers that represent money in our online banking accounts. And I keep having less of that.
This is the last full year I'll get to enjoy a fat tax deduction for being able to claim a child on my taxes. I had some plans for that, like finally replacing my hole-ridden old leather couches or finally finishing the car repairs I've been trying to get done piecemeal since about this time last year, but it looks like I'm going to be leaning toward saving up for things like warmth and meals.
There are two other strategies available to me: get married (to someone with an income. Sorry poor ladies, I'm sure you're nice, but DoorDash doesn't pay for itself) and/or have another kid. I know the kid thing sounds like the worst idea as there's a ton of up-front expense involved, but once you get out of the diaper phase, they can really bring a noticeable ROI on the ole tax form. Either way, it sounds like I have some real work to do on the wording of my Bumble profile.
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*I suppose the F-22 could do it, but only very, very briefly and way out of scale. I shudder to think what the HOA would say.
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