Can This Country Be Outraged by ANYTHING That Doesn't Involve a Sex Scandal?

For some reason the other day I was shaking my head thinking about how cars now cost what houses did a generation ago. Not just that this is true, but nobody seems to mind. How much for this car? $90K? Okay. No problem.

I'm not an economist (no, really!!) and I'm sure any number of smartasses could write in to me and break down how such pricing is not only natural but fair. But the scale seems to out of whack; at what point did it slide into our consciousness that $7.95 is an acceptable price to pay for a cheeseburger with fries that kinda sucks? $4/gallon for gas? No problem; let me buy the biggest hummer in the world so I can make sure to burn it all up as quick as possible. $4 for a gallon of milk? I'm sorry, are we putting the cows through college now?

But then just now I saw this, which to me is frightening. Not merely that the price of a box seat has gone from $3.50 to $250 since 1967. At a glance it's like well, I dunno, it's 40 years. But just in the last year it's gone from $150 to $250? First of all, what the fuck was it doing at $150 in the first place? And yes, I know part of the reason is cause it's the last year of the Stadium, thereby setting up suckers, but do you think it's going back down next year?

But even more shocking is the last ten years. I went to my first Yankees game in 1998. I did not get a box seat, but according to this list a box seat ticket was $45 (a price almost TRIPLE 4 years before, mind you.) Using the consumer price index, based on a ticket being $45 in 1998 a box seat today should be...$59. So you could DOUBLE what the CPI dictates and still be less than halfway to the $250 you gotta fork over to get the privilige of sitting in box seat sipping $14 warm beers. Unreal. Couple this with the fact that the middle class basically hasn't gotten a raise in 30 years and the dramatic rise in college costs, which also appear way off scale, and the silence is deafening.

I guess you can set whatever price you think people will fall for. I've been screaming for years now that fuck it, they should charge $10/gal for gas just to see what'll happen. Probably nothing, apparently. The higher the price these days, the more willing people seem to be to buy it, no problem. I'm gonna make a collection of pipe cleaner snowmen, put a price tag of $45,000 on each one and sit back and wait for the buyers to come flooding in. Fucking a.