The Hidden Costs

I was reading an article about the cost of school lunches going up when it occurred to me that the new energy crisis is going to change everything -- not just in car-oriented Los Angeles, but everywhere in our country. And it will hit everyone, even those people who were foresighted enough to buy fuel-efficient cars in an attempt to minimize the rising cost of gas. The sad fact is, even if you are running your personal transport off of used fry oil from the dive down the street, this one is still going to bite you...

Now, I don't mean to suggest that the school lunch story itself isn't a huge issue; worth far more attention than the few lines I'm giving it in this one obscure blog. The simple fact is that these subsidized meals have a huge place in the lives of the very poorest children in our society, in many cases making the difference between life an starvation, and even the most cold-hearted pragmatist can grasp the advantage of eliminating expensive crimes (to obtain food), expensive court costs and incarcerations (when people are tried and imprisoned for stealing food), and expensive treatments for deficiency diseases (when children do not get the right food). It’s even relatively easy to convince people that keeping these kids in school has both short-term (they stay out of trouble now) and long-term social benefits (they have a better chance of getting jobs later), and that getting fed is one of the most immediate reasons for going anywhere in the human experience…

But there’s not much point in making an argument if no one is going to take the other side, and in this case the only people who are going to argue against subsidized school lunches are a handful of neocon extremists (who hate every program that benefits anyone less fortunate than themselves – government subsidies are for giant corporations, not kids!) and a handful of delusional do-gooders who somehow feel that if school lunches were not made available, these kids would get better food (from where remains a mystery). Let me instead point out that one of the major costs cited in the article is an increase in the delivery costs of food, and that the cost of fuel is in fact driving up costs in all aspects of our food supply chain (e.g. tractor fuel costs more, delivery truck fuel costs more, energy to run food processing plants costs more, energy to run supermarkets costs more, and so on)…

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg…

Unless you purchase everything you buy direct from the factory, the cost of bringing your goods to market is going up. Unless the factory gets all of its raw material from the fields behind it, the cost of getting the raw materials to the factory is going up. Unless the factory runs directly on solar, geothermal or hydroelectric power, the cost of making your goods is going up, and so on. The fact is that for decades the U.S. economy has run on the basis of unlimited cheap energy, and now that energy is no longer unlimited (or cheap), the whole house of cards is starting to come down around our ears. And with China, India and other emerging countries likely to continue increasing their own demand for energy, this trend is unlikely to reverse itself…

This is not to suggest that we should deal with the crisis by running in circles making little shrieking noises. What I mean to suggest in this particular rant is that the world in which we live is changing before our very eyes, and like the people living in any other time of dynamic change, we must adapt to it. And in this particular case, when all of the politics and social engineering are over and done, it is going to fall to us, the business people and management professionals of the world, to find a way to make it all work again, or at least function in some acceptable new way, under these harsh new conditions. But if we can’t do this without destroying those programs (like the school lunch program) that keep our most vulnerable and fragile citizens from suffering and dying, then we have already lost…