Horace, > In the US the cost of litigation and medical care also push inflation, as > will the falling dollar due to debt financing and trade deficits.
I was surprised to find out, when you do the breakdown, that the major cost component (except for new expensive drugs) of increased medical is "general inflation" i.e. the effects of oil pushing everything else up. And it is hard to eliminate the "demand" issue of consumerism i.e. when the average person demands more than is necessary (cosmetic surgery, for instance) the cost of which pushes everything else up. http://healthcare.pwc.com/cgi-local/hcregister.cgi?link=pdf/fuel.pdf. and of course, the "falling dollar" and trade deficits all point back to oil also. But my using the word "only" in the original post was certainly a dose of hyperbole. However, productivity gains have kept inflation much lower than it otherwise would be, so it is a small hyperbole. Bottom line is that gasoline "should" cost no more than 20 cents a gallon now, and that ten-fold jump has been the self-imposed **push** for almost everything else (which is not a demand issue); and consequently has disguised the real culprit to the naive analysis. To say that gasoline does not cost more in inflationary terms is a huge joke on the consumer. Gasoline is responsible for almost ALL of the increase, not in everything else as well as its own price. Jones
