Excelsior

Inflation is back. Consumer prices are on a pathway ever onward, ever upward.

The Associated Press, an objective source by the way, doesn't mince words about the cause: "Consumer inflation accelerated in July, reflecting a big jump in gasoline and other energy prices. In evidence that the economy is slowing, industrial output in July slipped to just half the June pace."

The price of oil has been hovering around $75/barrel for weeks now, and the result has worked its way all the way through the economic pipeline.

The economics experts who post on the Yahoo stocks page keep nattering about how wonderful things are because of stock market gains, employment levels (yeah, all those people working for seven bucks an hour is really helping) and other irrelevant trivia.

Get it straight, geniuses. To paraphrase Vince Lombardi, the price of oil isn't the most important economic indicator, it's the only important economic indicator. Absolutely everything depends on it, and it's not going to get better until the folks with the money -- Exxon, Chevron, B.P. and R.D. Shell -- stop sitting on the cash and invest the billions that will be needed to develop tar sands, asphalts, and shale oil.

So far, they've shown no willingness to do that. They're profiting too handsomely from the way things are. They're profiting, and we're suffering.

Of course, it would be totally wrong for the government to try to tell them what to do, because government is bad and private enterprise is good.

Suggested reading: Deffeyes, Kenneth S., "Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak". Deffeyes is now a geology professor at Princeton and was a petroleum engineer at Shell Oil for 30 years. This is not a political book, but an engineer's book. He just lays out the facts, deadpan, and lets the reader draw his or her own political conclusions.