Editorial
Here is a funny little nugget I ran across while sifting through my filing cabinet of smart-aleck responses, replies, and rhetorical deflections. From those filed under antagonistic through clever to those listed between witty and zinger, the one that caught my attention did so less because of its sharpened Socratic-ism and more to do with the Nostradamatic way my smartass-ity came to pass-ity.
If you have spent longer than 10 minutes in either the news or public-service-related fields, you have heard an old quote by someone historians probably argue over, and nobody remembers the name of. The quote is in many ways, however, still fairly accurate.
“Never quarrel with a man who buys his ink by the barrel,” to which my Socratic attempt at humorous deflection while validating the news industry’s contribution is to say, “Do you have any idea how much a barrel of ink costs?”
What I once thought of as a quick piece of wit, I today find considerably less humorous. Seriously folks, you don’t want to know the overhead costs associated with applying the ink to this page, not to mention the cost of the paper it's printed on.
Between Trump’s well-intentioned but overzealous approach to tariffs on Canadian wood — the pulp of which is pressed into newsprint — along with Biden making plays like Leonard Hankerson of the 2014 Atlanta Falcons, it’s a wonder we’ve kept the presses rolling these past few years.
Plywood might have jumped to eighty bucks a sheet, but this newspaper still costs a single dollar, just like it did before the international policy changes signed between tweets of the last administration, the seemingly endless stream of fumbled opportunities within the current office.
While it's not the 35 cents we charged for each week’s edition through the 1960s, I would say the one dollar per copy we ask for now has held up pretty well to inflationary pressures.
The price of each edition is closer to mirroring current distribution costs than that of production. The USPS isn’t coming down on their prices either, but it still beats having to deliver the paper to our readers in Maine and Oregon myself.
However, despite the rising cost of everything from gravel to baby formula, there still seems to be a staggering amount of money up for grabs. I fully expect to see some new tech that creates the world’s first trillionaire. Although, at $1 per copy for ink and paper in a digital world, it’s not going to be me.
This isn’t where I tell you we are raising the price of the paper to $5 — although if we did, we could create more jobs. This is where I say that during these times where the outcome is yet undetermined, we must remain watchful of our government, especially at the state level.
As Texas legislature volleys for more control against the federal government, those same state officials block incitive programs while increasing regulations on everything from energy to education to health and safety. They also quietly reduce funding and reclassify some programs while dragging their heels on expanding others. And they do it while lowering tax rates and approving formulas to increase values that drive up tax payments.
I know it’s hard to keep your eyes on Austin while watching the price at the pump, but I’m afraid if we can’t get better control at the capital, I’m going start a Go-Fund-Me page for printing costs and hospitals will hold bake sales to perform X-rays