Running trains and electricity costs?

[P5se Camelback]

... re: [All Utility Rate and "necessary power-producing consumables cost"] increases. ... For years they kept telling us to cut back on water [and electricity and gasoline] and save. [So we did, we suck up, pulled in the belt and cut back our usage, esentially by lowering our lifestyle.] Now the revenue has dropped to the point that they have to increase the rate to support all the costs. So we conserved to the point that we got higher prices. ... Andrew

After taking a required Economics course in high school and Econ 101 as an elective junior year in college, I forsaw the eventual outcome of this riduculousness and never cut back a damn thing ... I did my part to consume freely and try to help keep prices low.

NEWSFLASH! The Law of Supply and Demand is reversed, turned 180, when it comes to Utilities, i.e., the less you use, the more it will cost, as production costs do not decrease but to the contrary, increase as raw materials costs and hourly employee wages increase, year after year. It is basic economics - the first class meeting of Econ 101!

So now, despite the individual efforts of a handful of us to keep prices low, the masses were sucked in to the propaganda of those who would love to see the northern half of the western hemisphere of this little rotating rock be just as poor and oppressed as the rest of the rock!

We must be punished for using our brains to devise ways to make life more comfortable and enjoying some life's little luxuries that we have developed along the way. It isn't fair that we should live as comfortably as we do when the inhabitants of poor countries, run by oppressive dictators, live in depressing hovels, enduring hard-scrabbble lives, sweating in summer and freezing in winter, with bearly enough to eat!
(... and no Lobster Thermador, Mr. President!)

I shall now step down from my Sunday morning soapbox.