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Why is everything so expensive?

Yesterday I paid my power bill.

After much research, I have been on the cheapest option available to me for quite some time yet I had to fork over $530 for a single month's use.

That'll probably shock a few people but remember that I'm up all hours of the night and morning thanks to the disruptive effects of PD and my only heating option for the office is electricity.

There's a computer that runs 24/7 although it's probably only sucking a few tens of watts most of the time -- thanks to the way technology has improved over the decades. Likewise my lights are all LED so that's slashed the amount of power consumed during the darker hours.

Of course I'm not alone in my astonishment at power prices. There are many people around the country who are finding it very hard to make ends meet, especially during winter.

Then there's the cost of food.

I'm on a relatively high protein diet and that can also be a drain on the wallet.

The price of all protein sources has skyrocketed in the past few years. Chicken was once an every-day food for me but now it's costing so much more than it did that I'm only eating it every second day and red meats are crazy-pricey.

Fresh fruit and veggies are sometimes just as eye-wateringly expensive and my love of dairy is costing me dearly. I eat about $6 worth of yogurt a day, drink $3 worth of milk and wolf down about $2 worth of cheese. That's nearly $80 a week just for my own cow-juice-based food.

Oh... I forgot... I also scoff about $40 a week in protein powder which is made from whey so I gess I donate $120 a week to our dairy industry.

Then there are local body rates which, as everyone knows, are being mercilessly hiked around the country. Here in the South Waikato we're looking at about a 65 percent hike over a five year period. How is that sustainable?

I'm not grizzling about my own situation, grim as it is, because I'm still lucky enough that I earn enough to pay the bills. It's the young families and those stuck on a fixed income such as pensioners that I feel sorry for.

Those people have no way to hike their incomes and no way to stave off the effects of these increases so they end up having to make very difficult choices. Do they skip one meal a day or do they skip paying the power bill?

In fact things have apparently gotten so bad that we're seeing headlines like this in the media: Do people earning $200,000 need help with childcare?

What's gone wrong?

Housing is becoming unaffordable for those who aren't already on the property ladder and New Zealand now has an attrociously low level of home ownership. Surely things will only get worse in a few decades when those without their own homes reach retirement and someone has to pay for their accommodation. Supperannuation is already a huge burden on the public purse and despite the current worker/employer-funded scheme it's not going to get at all better.

That will mean inevitable tax rises which will also contribute to the monthly financial shortfall that seems to be plaguing so many families.

So is this a real thing -- or have we simply changed our priorities over the decades?

As I've written before, when I was a kid our priorities were vastly different. There were very few two-car families, we all ate well but TV was a luxury. We were warm and clothed but our wardrobes weren't crammed with things we wore perhaps just once or twice a year and our choices were pragmatic rather than fashion-driven.

Eating out was the exception, not the rule -- which meant that takeaway food was a rare treat rather than the norm.

The electricity and communications networks were run as a public service, not as a great way for a few of the elite to make a fortune.

Bah... I'm heading off into "angry old man" territory now so I'll stop.

However, it strikes me that we're not planning and managing the evolution of our society -- we're simply allowing it to drift aimlessly in a way that does not seem to be delivering the best or most sustainable results for the majority of citizens.

Carpe Diem folks!

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