Economics

My birthday gift from my employer was a 50% reduction in hours. Happy birthday to me. Of course by the end of my new, shorter shift, the cafe manager was already back-pedaling when he figured out that if we weren't there, he would be doing a lot more scut work. So now I have some of the hours back that I lost just 24 hours ago. Next week, there is supposed to be a big ad blitz that is going to pack the place to the rafters and all will be well.

Right.

Meanwhile, in the real world, consumer prices fell more last month than any time since the invention of the consumer price index. A lot of that was the sharp decline in gas prices, but even factoring that out, prices still dropped.

Probably has something to do with people being forced to live on what they make.

Oil prices continue to drop as people stop burning gas. I've talked to a couple people over the last week and it seems that many people have made permanent, structural changes to their lives and have no intention of jumping back into the SUV and driving all over the country just because gas prices have pulled back. We made a decision two years ago to become a one-car household and have no plans to run out and buy a second car. Even though my job is once-again turning to crap, we are still ahead of the game by sticking to one vehicle that goes about 5 miles a day instead of two cars that cover over 100 miles a day combined. I've said for years that our national focus should be to make the damn Arabs drink their oil.

More bad news for the Big 3 auto companies: It looks like there is a great deal of resistance to making taxpayers pay for 10,000 guys to sit in a room and do crossword puzzles every day while the assembly lines continue to churn out over-priced crapmobiles that no one in their right mind would buy.

And unless you are in the south or west, don't plan on making money building houses. I'm not sure where in the west all this construction is going on, but it ain't around here. Lots of empty buildings all over town.

And the DOW closed below 8,000.

Enough bad news for one day.