Today I'm reporting on the cost of Kimberly-Clark products going up .. for the second time this year.

If you're the parent of an infant or a toddler, you know that Kimberly-Clark makes Huggies diapers and Pull-Ups Training pants. And now the cost is going up anywhere from 6 to 8 percent. Kimberly-Clark says it's to counter the rising cost of materials, like pulp, to make paper and polypropylene, which is used in diapers. And to be fair, the price hike also affects Kleenex and two brands of toilet paper and one brand of paper towels.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll say that we are not a Huggies family. We are a Pampers family, because through real-life trial and error, we found that Siobhan had the fewest leaks and explosions and diaper rash with Pampers. One of my best friends swears by Huggies, though.

Anyway, the cost of everything is going up -- food, gas (!), and now diapers too. Well, okay, to be fair, the cost of a house is not going up, not in this area at least. New reports say the cost of a house in the Lansing area is *down* about 19 percent.

It feels like the cost of just being is going up -- everyday, it seems, we're reporting on the price of something going up, up, up. I guess the question is: where's the breaking point? And I'm afraid, that for many families in mid-Michigan, if the financial breaking point isn't near, then it's been passed already, sometime in the last few years.

There will always be people who are sort of recession-proof, like doctors, for instance, or lawmakers. The problem is all the people who aren't recession-proof and all the people who have already lost jobs who can't find another one that pays quite as well. One expert I talked to recently pointed out that all these wonderful high-paying jobs are leaving Michigan and a lot of the jobs left behind are the sort of jobs that don't pay well. Well, they don't pay at all unless you have the right education. And, as we all know, the cost of a 4-year degree at Michigan's public universities keeps going up too.

So everything, from diapers to doctorate, costs us all more. The problem is, can we afford NOT to pay?