The price of gas

I spent half the day on the phone trying to sell barley, get a solid price on the aforementioned barley, collect hay money, sell more hay, trying to talk a dairyman into a really good deal on grass pellets because he is getting hosed on his feed bill, and hearing people telling me they are broke.
Here is the deal,
Fuel and fertilizer are too expensive.
We hear the pundits going on about the budget and the loan crisis and people's spending habits and this and that but they don't really have a clue. No one in the press or in the government has ever really worked for their living.
The truth is that $4 gasoline and potash above $500 kills the whole economy. Everything that we buy involves fuel. Everything that we eat requires P and K to grow. There is a lot of fuss about natural gas and nitrogen but you can compost and you can conserve N. But P and K and lime are the building blocks of soil health. The USA no longer has cheap potash and lime costs a fortune to haul and fuel is so expensive you can't afford to farm.
Food prices must go up.
When fuel and food go up people can't meet their payments and they loose their homes, they can't buy the useless crap that fuels our economy and tax revenues go down.
However, the clever folks are so determined to lie to us about everything, and are so committed to doing the wrong thing, that we never really address this issue.
Everyone I talked to today is expecting the worst.
I listened to them talk about the budget on the radio. It was a really big unfunny joke...
In other news, I went to my daughter's school convention. It was an interesting cultural experience. More on that later.
The kids were incredibly well behaved and they all seemed quite happy and mostly self confident. Interesting experience. Perhaps more on that later.