Pole Vault Camp and Jeeps
A good friend of mine contacted my yesterday. He’s one of the “pole vault guys” that I’ve known for decades, and he’s running a camp. One of his coaches might not be available, and he wondered if I was interested.
I’m always interested in coaching pole vault camps. I’ve already done two this summer: the coaching is fun, and the conversation with other coaches makes me better every time. My default answer (after talking to my wife, of course) is yes. But there is one issue: it’s four hundred miles away.
My 2004 Jeep Wrangler is awesome: manual shift, four-wheel drive (when needed), soft top that can be completely removed, and a sound system that works, even at seventy miles an hour with the top off. There’s one hang-up. On a good day, in two-wheel drive on the highway, the Jeep gets about sixteen miles a gallon.
Round trip is 800 miles. Divided by sixteen miles a gallon – that’s fifty gallons of gas. At somewhere around $4.70 a gallon, that’s $230 in gas to get there and get home. Now I don’t coach camp for free. And a “pit coach”, my position, is well paid in the Pole Vault Camp world. Suffice to say though: it’s a four day camp, and the first two days might pay for the gas.
Record Inflation
Yesterday the news world was all doom and gloom. The inflation rate was over 9%, higher than it’s been in forty years. The newscasters went through each item: eggs, milk, airline tickets, bread, new houses, and, of course, gas prices. I didn’t really need to watch the news to figure that out: Wednesday I paid $12 for a pound of sliced deli ham and almost the same for a pound of sliced deli cheese; almost twice what I paid three months ago.
Like many Americans, I got a “pay raise” to my retirement this year, a 3% Cost of Living Allowance (COLA). That sounded great: but it looks like, at the moment, I’m down 6%, not up three.
But when I looked at the “list” of everything that costs more, it seems to me that they all have one thing in common – airline tickets and eggs, new houses and deli ham. All those things require, one way or another, gas. The eggs, ham, and cheese are transported from the “farm” to the wholesaler to the store. The biggest continuing cost for airlines is jet fuel. And the materials for the new house came from the forest, to the processor, to the lumber yard, to the worksite.
In short, inflation isn’t about the cost of eggs, or the rest. It’s all about the cost of the oil : oil made into the gas for the Jeep, or the diesel for the egg trucks, or the jet fuel for the Boeing 737’s. The prime driver of our price increases is the increase in the cost of getting whatever it is to wherever it has to go.
Economics 101
And why it the price of oil so high? Well, there’s still a war going on in Ukraine. The Western world is boycotting Russian oil. The US had to replace 7% of our oil, and Europe is replacing 25% of theirs. If Russian oil isn’t used, then the actual “supply” of oil on the world market gets smaller. In Economics 101 our first lesson was the “mantra”: when supply goes down, and demand remains the same, price goes up. So the cost of oil increased. We know: by the incredible new prices on our local gas pump, and at our grocery store, and all the other items that are moved by oil.
That’s why President Biden is headed to Saudi Arabia today. Sure, we are still mad about the butchering of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, and the human catastrophe in Yemen. But the Saudi’s have…
“what the world (still) needs now: it’s oil, sweet oil. It’s the only thing, that’s there just not enough of…” (sorry, Burt Bacharach, and all my global climate change friends).
Biden needs the Saudis to boost their oil production. And in Riyadh – there’s always a way to make a deal.
Not Just Oil
There’s no doubt that there are multiple causes of our inflation. The world virtually shut down during the Covid pandemic. Nations did their best to help their citizens through the crisis, pumping lots of money into their economies. And since those economies were slow, a lot of that money wasn’t spent while we isolated from Covid. Once the economies opened back up, all of that “extra” money flooded back in. Lesson two of Economics 101: when the demand for goods goes up, and the supply of goods remains the same (or is low because production was slowed by Covid), prices will go up.
So we faced inflation anyway, no matter who was elected the President of the United States in 2020. But what’s the difference between four or five percent and “record breaking” nine percent? The cost of oil, that made the cost of gas at the pump sky-rocket. And it only feels worse by the contrast to the record setting lows of two years ago during the height of the pandemic shutdown.
Gas prices are gradually coming back down. Part of that is due to reallocating American oil production, part is pressure on the oil companies not to take exorbitant profits, and part is regular folks reacting to the high prices (reducing demand). And with gas prices going down, we should see the other costs lower for: eggs, ham, cheeses, construction costs and airline tickets. But, Lesson three of Econ 101: prices go up fast, they come down slow.
But if we can keep pressure on Russia, cutting their oil profits, maybe we can slow their attack on Ukraine. That’s worth the cost.
I bet there’s no COLA for “Pit Coaches” this year. I’ll probably go anyway.
