Time to wake up and smell the recession

Nelson Graves
Published: May 8, 2008

The story about rising food prices, entitled “Food Crisis,” on the May 2 front page of The News Virginian was ironic, considering the headline on Page A5 in the same edition. It read: “Bush urges $770M in food aid.”
While it’s morally correct, required and great that America is considerate of those less fortunate than us, it also says a lot about President Bush. Again, he seems oblivious to the suffering taking place in his own country.
“Suffering” may be too strong a word. “Struggling” is a better one, but the point is that with America’s economy in crisis, particularly high mortgage and credit card payments, rising gas prices and low wages that aren’t keeping pace with rising prices – shouldn’t Bush be doing more to help his own country’s people?
Of course, he can’t. If he did, he couldn’t continue denying America is in a recession. And, please, does Bush really believe those $600 rebate checks will help? Those checks already have been spent at the gas station and grocery store.
In February, the Bush administration initiated an economic relief plan for Americans. Bush officials felt that only taxpayers who actually paid taxes, about a 117 million people, should get rebates. The Democratic controlled Congress insisted that 20 million non-taxpayers also should receive the rebates. The non-taxpayers included those on Social Security or retirees who are exempt from paying taxes.
The first checks weren’t sent until the last week of April and that was a week earlier than originally planned. On his weekly radio address May 3, Bush said the American people needed the money to keep up with rising food and gasoline prices and the mortgage crisis. Is he just realizing that prices are outpacing disposable money?
Yet the administration moved with speed (overnight) when it decided to bail out financial giant Bear Stearns. This administration has yet to help, meaningfully, the average person who is facing eviction, foreclosure and probably bankruptcy from taking risky loans.
Congress must share some of the blame for allowing financial conditions to deteriorate. The Bush administration could not have helped Bear Stearns without congressional approval.
When grocery shopping, it’s not unusual to see clerks raising prices as shoppers gather items on their lists. And many gas stations raise prices a couple times a day or at minimum, once a day as reports of oil prices increase.
Isn’t it odd that stations raise prices as soon as a crude-oil price increase is announced but it takes days for those prices to decrease? Has anyone seen the cost of gas drop twice in one day?
Just as the cost of necessities – food, fuel and utilities — go up, so will crime. People won’t allow their families to go without food nor is it likely that a breadwinner will stay home from work because he or she’s out of gas.
Worst of all, those living on fixed incomes will be among the crime statistics.
Nelson Graves, Western Virginia director of the Virginia Minority Supplier Development Council, writes a weekly column for The News Virginian. E-mail him at .