inflation – Moe Lane

Now is the time to buy my books, or read them on KU, because things may change soon.

I don’t particularly want to raise prices. I was happy with the $2.99/$4.99 price points for e-books, $12.99 for paperbacks (which has already been discarded, going forward), and keeping my stuff on Kindle Unlimited. Unfortunately, I don’t run global economic policy, and global economic policy is starting to tell me that I need more markets to compete in, and that fixed prices are going up, which means that things like editing and artwork are going up, and… well, you can work out the rest. Time to grab my books now, before costs go up.

When will this happen? Good question. GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND is going to be a test bed. When the book is ready, it’ll be going on both Amazon and Barnes & Noble, plus whatever other platforms look like they’d be a good deal. And it will not be going on Kindle Unlimited. Kindle, sure. But Amazon’s going to lose its exclusivity. We’ll see how it all works out; once I have a handle on the results I’ll decide how I’m releasing my other books more widely. This is a fall and winter project, but hopefully not a 2024 one.

#rsrh Grocery bills ARE up. Noticeably.

I do the food shopping for the family, and I can attest to this personally: prices have been increasing for about a year now. More accurately, the per-unit prices have increased; the actual vendor’s product typically either has a higher sales price for the same amount of product as a year ago, or else offers less product in order to avoid ‘raising prices.’ I’m seeing more ‘price freeze’ promotions from supermarkets – which means that the supermarkets are just eating the increased costs themselves in order to keep their customer base.

This should not surprise anybody. We’re deliberately restricting energy production in this country, which inevitably leads to higher fuel prices, which inevitably leads to higher retail prices for everything that relies on fuel for transport*. We’re also subsidizing the conversion of perfectly good foodstock into a relatively inefficient fuel in order to placate Leftist religious fanatics, and never mind the implications for food prices at home and geopolitical stability abroad. Right now the major thing keeping this from being a major political headache is because our old – which is to say, pre-2007** – economic model was very, very good at keeping even our poor adequately fed by historical*** standards; we’re still coasting on that.

We might even be able to coast on it until the grown-ups get control back.

Moe Lane

Via Zero Hedge, via Instapundit.

Moe Lane Continue reading #rsrh Grocery bills ARE up. Noticeably.

Sixty bucks for gas and Mickey Dee’s.

More accurately: $61.49, but that does not flow off the tongue as well.

Permit me to establish some general, life-experience-style benchmarks for our current domestic economy. This morning, I went out to fill up the gas tank of the car, and treat my kids to some fast-food breakfast. Nothing fancy: the car does not take premium gasoline, and we’re talking breakfast sandwiches and a hotcakes and sausage level of drive-through. Here are the receipts.

SIXTY DOLLARS. Continue reading Sixty bucks for gas and Mickey Dee’s.

Assigning blame for higher food prices.

Via Instapundit comes this story warning that restaurant food prices are about to sharply rise. The challenge for the government? Why, finding who to blame, of course.

After all: can’t blame it on short-sighted conversion of corn crops into ethanol; the government’s pushing for even more use of ethanol, despite the objections of the auto industry. Can’t blame it on higher gas prices; the government doesn’t really want to explain why it’s put a moratorium on offshore drilling in (disproportionate) response to last year’s Gulf oil spill. And there’s absolutely, positively, and completely no possible way that this administration is going to let even the hint of a suggestion of an implication of a reference to The Dread Word “Stagflation” escape any lips of any person associated with the executive branch. If that happens, the President might as well put on a sweater, muck up a hostage rescue, and go get beat up by a rabbit now – just to get it over with.

No, the government’s most comfortable option is, as always, to blame somebody on the Right for all of this. My guess? Rush Limbaugh. He hasn’t been the subject of a Two-Minute Hate recently, and this administration likes to cycle through their favorite targets of those, lest overuse of any one of them makes the whole thing stale.

Moe Lane (crosspost)