The Cost of Living Crisis Continues in the UK....

The latest reports show inflation at a ten year high in the UK, and it's 'the basics' that are driving it...

Housing, petrol, gas, food, all of these have seen sharp > 5-20% price increases in the last year, especially gas.

And owners of small businesses report that 'everything is going up in price', all costs which are going to have to be passed onto the consumer, and they're the lucky ones - for those working in the GIG economy, for a company such as Uber, they are stuck with the rate set by Uber, and just have to suck up any additional costs themselves!

I guess this is due to the combination of the chosen political reaction (lock down) to the Pandemic, Brexit and Russia not helping by turning down our gas supply, all squeezing supply chains, which pushes prices of essentials up for essential goods, because these are much more inelastic:

With luxury items and leisure activities people can just choose not to spend money on them if prices go up, limiting inflation, but with housing, transport (for workers or anyone with childcare duties), food and utilities most people have much less capacity to do with less of each - hence why you just have to suck it up and pay more.

These figures sound pretty dire, when around 20% of the UK population already live in poverty, this will drag another few percentage points of people into poverty too.

Is there any way out of this?

Personally I just can't see it.... I think this is the trend with the global fiat-market economy anyway - more development, more consumption, combined with political tensions, lockdowns, it all just restricts trade flows and pushes up prices in the context of increasing demand.

And governments seem to be largely incompetent in dealing with the situations - too small and not committed enough to make the kind of ground up investments which would be required to reduce the basic costs of living in the long term, not that we'd want governments to be doing this anyway.

Big up the small scale escape.....

Seems like I'm in the right place, positioned to be able to meet a large chunk of my food and energy needs from the land and with minimal transport and other costs.

The only thing bugging me is that I just can't see this as a solution for everyone... maybe escaping from the global decline is all we've got?!?

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