Thinking Out Loud

By Gerard Meister

“Eureka,” I shouted when oil dropped below forty-bucks a barrel. After all is said and done, by my reckoning living in a large house in gated community in Florida is as close to heaven as you can get. True, we have more than our share of hurricanes, but we have no state income taxes and that counts for something. Still, there is “one burr under the saddle,” as Will Rogers might say, and that is the cost of electricity.

My house, you see, is all electric, which means that between the air-conditioning, heating the swimming pool and Jacuzzi, powering the washer and dryer, two computers, three television sets and a stove/oven/microwave plus having two grandchildren living around the corner from us (and who have yet to shut off a light when leaving a room), makes us a prime customer for Florida Power and Light with bills running between four and five hundred a month, every month. But now, with oil dropping as fast as General Motors’ stock, I figured I was in line for a substantial reduction in my electric costs. Goodness gracious, my friends, the cost of oil dropped 75%! Something’s got to give.

But, as a realist I knew I would never see a matching drop in my bills, because that’s not how capitalism works when you look at the macro economic picture. For example, note that during the time frame of the oil prices plummeting the price of a postage stamp went up four cents, which, granted, must be factored into the cost equation. Still, I was confident that I was in for a nice piece of change.

And finally it came: the notice of the pending price reduction hit the evening news and it would average $1.52 for houses my size and I must admit I was a bit disappointed. In a thirty-day month I would net forty-six bucks, which, I calculated, was about a ten percent reduction. “Well”, I said to myself that’s better than nothing.

It wasn’t until the next morning that I learned that the reduction of $1.52 was not for a day; it was for an entire month! That’s a savings of about three tenths of one percent (0.3%). If that’s capitalism, who knows if maybe Karl Marx wasn’t right all along? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what Obama does about this.

I’ll keep you posted.