Bombfuzzled

I would normally be in class right now instead of blogging, but I seem to have a free hour because of a bomb threat in the building where my class should be meeting. You'll probably hear about it on the news tonight, as I saw a news van cruising around campus a few minutes ago.

I just wish the guy had called in the threat a little earlier so that I wouldn't have walked all the way across campus just to find the building closed.

Things that make you go hmmm.

Yesterday Husband and I received a notice from the Internal Revenue Service that we may be receiving a tax rebate check from the government. The letter was very vague, and it didn't say much more than what we have been hearing on the news for the past several weeks. Husband and I just shook our heads and wondered how much money our government has just wasted sending out letters to everyone who may get a check.

According to a Newsweek article, the cost to send a letter out to approximately 130 million households is 41.8 million dollars.

Nearly $42 million to tell us something that anyone who has been even remotely near a television or radio for the past month has already heard about.

There are so many things I could say right now, but I think just shaking my head will suffice.

Independent truckers will soon be priced out of business.

Unless you drive a diesel powered vehicle, you probably haven't thought much about the fact that the price of diesel has recently risen to around $3.75, which is around .60 higher than regular gasoline. If you don't have to buy diesel, you may think that this doesn't affect you. However, you are wrong.

Have you noticed the price of groceries going up? Much of the reason for the escalation in food prices can be attributed to high diesel prices. Think about it. Nearly everything that you buy in the store arrived there in a truck that runs on diesel fuel, and when the cost of diesel goes up, so does the cost of transporting those goods to the stores. Thus, the prices of those goods goes up accordingly.

Up until the past few years, the price of a gallon of diesel fuel had been lower than the price of a gallon of regular gasoline by around 30 to 40 cents. However in the past four to five years, diesel has been 15 to 25 cents more than gasoline, and just last week, diesel went up nearly 25 cents per gallon in one day.

Even if you can still afford to fill up your car's gas tank, the cost of diesel is something we all need to be concerned about because the higher the price of diesel, the higher the price of nearly everything else we buy, including that gasoline that gets hauled to the gas pumps in a diesel truck.