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When Gas Prices Go Up, So Do Other Prices; And Business Fail. There is a Relationship Between Business Failures, High Gas Prices, and Unemployment

By Joseph McDaniel, Esq.

When I was a kid, oil companies and gas stations would bribe my parents to buy their brand of gasoline with things like free glasses with cactus of various species painted on them.

That was when we had gas stations at every corner, and I didn't have to do a logistical search to figure out which gas station in the vicinity I could reach with the fumes in my tank and still not support Hugo Chavez. AND see if I could figure out how to operate the pay-to-play air hose to fill the tire that my computerized car was telling me about, again and again and again.

On the other hand, high gas prices bother me a lot less than most people, because I'm close to the Biltmore, and my law office is just across from the Biltmore Golf Course in Phoenix. And it's not always easy to find, so I ask people to use my Google Places Page, because I haven't yet figured out how to use my Bing Maps Page.

With most people in Arizona, driving is a big deal because we don't have the population density to support a super-duper public transit system, and we don't like those anyway; a lot of us are still cowboys who don't like to sit that close to somebody unless we already shook and said Howdy. Not me, mind you, because horses scared me too much which I was a kid at the Sunday School Ride Event (when you get there late, and there's only one horse left, they put you on "Thunderbolt". Not pretty at all.).

And since it's downright difficult to function with distances that can't be easily imagined if you work in New York City, everybody here has cars, and has to keep them in bankruptcy cases, or figure out "Plan B" to get an alternative car. And I ain't talkin' fuel.

So for folks in Arizona, it's intuitively obvious (don't ask a cowboy about his intuition, by the way; he won't sit next to you on the bus) that when there are higher gas prices, there are going to be more business bankruptcy cases.

So we depend on cars, and if we do real work for a living, pickup trucks. There are a lot of pickup trucks in Phoenix, along with soccer moms driving SUVs.

And when gas prices go up, I do see more business bankruptcy cases.

Which means there's more unemployment.

Which means more consumer bankruptcy cases. 

Which is why it confuses me that anybody at any newspaper at all could treat the issue of national energy policy as though it's a chess piece in a political game. Japan and Germany lost a large war because they ran out of oil and gas.

No kidding. Ask Rommel.

So I can't understand why it's an issue for any single political party whether we drill, dig, build nuclear reactors (like the utterly safe 300 reactors in Japan, and all those in France), as this article seems to suggest.

Oh, I get it.

That's from New York City!

Get the rope.

p.s. It may sound like I'm kidding, but I'm not. I don't care about political rhetoric; I work for a living. What I care about is whether the decent, hardworking people who live around me have to pay crazy prices for gasoline, or fuel oil, or electricity. And I don't care which political party delivers, because I'm pretty skeptical of any politician these days. But I want the gas, and I want electricity, and I want the balance of payments disaster fixed right now, and I'll vote for any party that gets it out of the ground, and helps fix the current balance of payment disaster and the current unemployment debacle.

p.p.s. I also want the increased (full) employment that shows up if we build fifty nuclear power plants, dig for coal, drill for oil anywhere is lives, AND put up giant windmills, starting RIGHT NOW! Heck, just building so many windmills will burn up a bunch of the labor force, as long as we don't outsource the project. And if we do, well, we really need to tie all of our politicians to the windmills, and have a dizzy party! 

p.p.p.s. I also want to be six foot four and twenty years old, but I probably won't get that wish anytime soon, either.

Full post as published by Arizona Bankruptcy Attorney Blog on January 26, 2011 (boomark / email).