TWO BUCKS.(value of money)

Two dollars doesn't buy much--half a hot dog at Yankee Stadium, one shined shoe outside Grand Central--but it is twice as much as one, and everybody, unfortunately, is acquainted with the value of a dollar. Two dollars will get you a roll of hockey tape, or a Budweiser tall boy, or a few .9-millimetre rounds, or a bet at OTB. At the Brighton Clean laundromat, on West Fifteenth Street, it buys an hour and twenty minutes of dryer time; at Show World, the peepshow palace on Eighth Avenue, it's good for six minutes of "Barefoot & Pregnant"or "Dawn of the Debutantes"in booth No. 16. Two dollars also happens to be the amount, according to the World Bank, that a person must earn every day in order to stay above the poverty line. This standard applies to the underdeveloped world and not to an overdeveloped town like New York, where, last week, the price of a subway or bus ride finally rose from a dollar-fifty to two bucks, after a judge ruled that allegations of financial shenanigans at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority did not preclude a fare hike. You don't have to be starving to feel that two dollars is a lot to pay for a token, especially now that you don't actually get the token (tokens were eliminated last week, too). MetroCards will henceforth be depleted in giant steps. Two trips a day, five days a week, fifty weeks a year: that comes to an extra two hundred and fifty dollars annually, the equivalent of seven whole dryer days at Brighton Clean. In the middle of all this, the Federal Reserve muttered some things last Tuesday about deflation, though almost everything in these parts seems to be going up: taxes, taxis, tolls, gas, rent, yogurt.

One good thing the fare hike did was to reinstate the pizza principle, an economic axiom advanced twenty-three years ago, in the Times' Metropolitan Diary, by Eric M. Bram, a patent ...