By Staff
Desperate Americans are unloading belongings, even heirlooms, at bargain-basement prices.
On Craigslist, the online flea market where for-sale listings are up 70 percent since July, three of the four fastest-growing for-sale categories are gas-related – recreational vehicles such as campers and trailers, cars and trucks, and boats.
An April 30 Associated Press report in the Detroit Free Press told about an Alabama woman who turned to eBay and flea markets to empty her three-bedroom mobile home of DVDs, VCRs, stereos and televisions.
She said she needs the cash to offset soaring food and utility bills and mounting health care expenses from her dump-truck-driving husband's 2006 disability.
She even parted with her grandmother's teakettle for $6.
"We've had bouts here and there, but we always got by. This time it's different," she said.
A Georgia teenager's posted plea said her mother lost her job: "Please buy anything you can to help out."
"This is not about downsizing. It's about needing gas money," said the founder of a North Carolina online auction service.
How else to explain an unemployed, formerly affluent customer selling Hermes leather jackets, Versace jeans and silk shirts?
Craigslist listings more than doubled to almost 15 million from a year ago.
Chief Executive Officer Jeff Buckmaster is most struck by the desperate tone of some ads.
Those of us who have been ranting for some time about how worthless Congress is at solving any of many big issues facing this country seemed to find an unlikely ally April 29.
President George W. Bush!
According to USA Today's account of a news conference in the White House Rose Garden (his first in two months!), he ripped Congress for "letting the American people down" on issues ranging from food and gas prices to foreign trade and intelligence.
But wait, at the same time the president declined to go along with congressional proposals to open the nation's strategic petroleum reserve, declare a summer moratorium on gas taxes or add domestic priorities to a $108-billion spending bill for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The problem with suspending gas taxes is that they finance the Highway Trust Fund, which is already going broke.
A summer gas-tax holiday would probably cost the Highway Trust Fund another $10 billion in lost revenue.
The price of gas has gone up 129 percent since the last change in the federal gas tax in 1997.
Bush alternately accused lawmakers of "playing politics," a "lack of leadership" and "inactivity" on big issues.
"I don't think this is too much to ask, even in an election year," he said.
Bush resisted opining much about the White House race, except to predict that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., will win (and give him a third term).
Bush said he would consider any congressional proposals to lower gas prices, but he did not specifically endorse McCain's plan for a gas-tax holiday and he opposed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (remember her?) proposal to open up the strategic petroleum reserve.
Bush also defended his administration's decision to withhold information from Congress until now on North Korea's alleged role in building a nuclear reactor in Syria that Israel bombed last September.