There’s a line I won’t cross. That line is ninety-nine cents. That’s the amount I’m willing to pay for a two-liter bottle of soda, pop, coke or whatever you call a soft drink wherever you live.
Anything more than a dollar and I don’t feel I’m getting enough enjoyment from the product to justify the cost. Unless I can find soda for less than a buck, I won’t buy it. It’s not that I couldn’t pay more. It’s just that I don’t want to. So, I don’t.
In my mind, a two-liter bottle of Diet Sprite shouldn’t cost any more than ninety-nine cents. Not that long ago it was easy to find sodas at that price. But not any longer. These days, the “normal” price in my area is more than two bucks apiece. There must be a lot of people willing to pay that price or they wouldn’t charge that much. But, to me, a two-liter bottle of diet anything isn’t worth more than a dollar.
So, when the sales flyers from the local grocery stores show up in my mailbox each week, I glance through them to see if there’s a “deal” somewhere on two-liter bottles of soda. If there is, I’ll swing by the store and stock up.
That’s the whole idea. The concept is called “loss leader”. That’s where a store will sell something below cost to entice people to come into their store and buy something else.
As you know, from time to time I repurpose familiar terms and use them for something other than for what they were originally intended. Stores don’t really need that term anymore because they can just use the word, “sale”. So today, I think it’s time to repurpose the term “loss leader” and use it for something a bit more relevant.
Every Saturday morning, I get an email summarizing my retirement accounts. And every Saturday morning, I see my balances lower than the week before. Sometimes much lower. In fact, since Biden took office, my retirement accounts have lost over 25% of their value. And, if you consider that everything costs much more than it did, that 25% loss is more like a 50% loss.
Now, it wasn’t all that long ago that I looked forward to getting those weekly balance summaries. Because every week, they were a little higher than the week before. But not any longer. I really hate to click on the email because I know it’s going to put me in a bad mood. Because I’ve lost the potential of buying things when I spend that money in the future. Because I won’t even have that money to spend.
About once a week my wife has to stop by a gas station and fill up her car so she can drive to work. And every time she fills up her car, she’s reminded just how fucked up our economy is. Each week, the cost of a full tank of gas costs more than the week before. Sometimes a lot more. In fact, since Biden took office, the price of gas has nearly doubled.
But at least I can decide to not click on the email that I know will put me in a bad mood. My wife doesn’t have that option. She has to buy gas if she wants to get to her job. To make more money. So she can buy more gas.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s not just gas that costs more. EVERYTHING costs more.
Which brings me to the next thing we’ve lost. Our paychecks have lost buying power. Since this President has been “in charge”, and I use that term loosely, inflation has hit record numbers. It’s at the highest rate it has been in over four decades. Every dollar you earn has lost more than 12 percent of its value since this President took office, when compared to before the previous President left office. And that’s just so far. It’s only going to get worse.
We’ve also lost the ability to keep our stores stocked with groceries. From a wallet-half-full point of view, I guess it could be considered a good thing. Because people don’t have to worry quite so much about not having money when what they want to buy isn’t even there in the first place.
We’ve lost faith in the government. Why should we believe them? Every single thing that comes off the teleprompter is a lie. Last week, Biden’s press secretary looked right in the camera and said, “we are stronger economically than we have been in history.” So, either she’s high on something, a complete idiot, or she’s a damn liar. I suspect it’s a little of each.
It’s true, governments have been lying since they were invented. But there used to be a chance that they were being straight with us. Not anymore. Lying has become the go-to move on both sides of the aisle.
We’ve lost confidence in the integrity of our election process. No one has even tried to explain all the issues identified with the 2020 election. Instead of passing laws to protect our right to a fair election, Congress has been busy passing laws guaranteed to make it even easier to cheat.
We’ve lost our self-respect. Who can possibly be proud when we see our president spout gibberish when reading from a teleprompter? And, in the rare instances when he does manage to string together a coherent sentence in English, his team has to run around behind him and tell everyone what he meant when he said what actually said. He doesn’t project an image of power, he projects an image of frailty. I’m embarrassed that he represents America.
Another thing that some people have lost is their fucking minds. Thanks in part to our President’s insane nerfing of Title IX and his bizarre executive orders, we’ve got people who honestly believe that men can wish themselves into becoming women.
That’s led to William Thomas being nominated by the University of Pennsylvania to be the NCAA Woman of the Year. You heard that right. A man has been nominated to be Woman of the Year. Sometime in the last year and a half, a very small number of mentally defective people managed to convince a large number of slightly-less-mentally-defective people that this is a good thing.
Finally, and perhaps worst of all, many of us have lost hope. We’ve lost hope that things will get better. We’ve lost hope that anyone in our government is working on our behalf to Make America Great Again.
America has lost a lot in the last year and a half. We’re breaking records for how much we’ve lost. And there is no reason to believe it’s going to get any better any time soon. With each day, we lose just a little more of what we had the day before.
So yeah, I think it’s time to repurpose the term “loss leader” and use it to refer to a leader that has caused Americans to lose more money, self-respect and hope than at any other time in history. Or maybe we don’t need a new term. We can just call him Joe Biden.
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