Letter to the Editor: People will always complain about high prices

“It’s the economy, stupid!” Remember that old political saying from the 1990s? Here we are in another presidential election cycle 30 years later, and the economy is still what everyone is talking and complaining about. I was watching an old black and white movie from the early 1950s on TV the other day, and at one point one of the characters was complaining about prices being “so high.” The 1950s!

As far back as I can remember, starting in the 1960s, I would hear people complaining about the high cost of living and high prices. In the 1970s people complained about high grocery and gas prices. In the 1980s, people complained about high grocery and gas prices. In the 1990s, in the 2000s, and all the way up to today, people were and still are complaining about high prices the same way their parents and grandparents complained all those years ago.

And yet we and all those on the cable news outlets and all over social media act like this is something new, that prices have only recently gotten too high. We seem to look at the past through those ever-present “rose-colored glasses” we all seem to own.

Fact is, prices have always been thought of as being “too high,” no matter the price and no matter the generation affected by them.

People have always complained about high prices and the only difference between then and now is that now, thanks to cable news and social media apps like Facebook and TikTok and X, we have all sorts of new and creative ways to complain.

Politicians love to use the economy to manipulate voters, when the truth is that no matter who gets elected, people will never be satisfied with prices in the grocery store or at the gas pump, and will always look for someone to blame. Of course, maybe if wages had kept up with inflation so that folks, instead of just getting by, could actually get ahead, things might be perceived differently.

But I’m sure then we would just find something else to complain about.

John Moore

Newton