what has caused the extreme rises in cost of living since 1973

Cost of living expenses rise based mostly upon whatever energy you are using. In this case it has been oil since 1973. When gasoline rose from 17 cents a gallon to over 1 dollar during the 1970s this put a monkey wrench into the lives of regular Americans. And the ONLY relief is if you are rich enough to buy either a Tesla, or a Prius or something like that and then put solar cells on your roof so basically you (for all intents and purposes) never by gasoline again. (at least while you are driving your all electric car like a Tesla or a Nissan Leaf. (a Prius is a hybrid and not all electric like a Leaf or Tesla).

So, the cost of food raises as the cost of oil goes up. The cost of things you buy goes up whenever the cost of oil and gas goes up. Everything costs more when oil and gas and diesel cost more if that is the fuel they are using to transport it to you or to generate the electricity to  manufacture whatever it is. At each and every point the cost of living goes up for cars, food, things, houses, building materials (everything) whenever oil and gas and diesel go up.

So, the best time for the middle Class and poor in the U.S. (as far as buying power went) was about 1945 until 1973 when the Arab Oil embargo hit and oil skyrocketed through the 70s and 80s and 90s.

This is when the middle Class and poor became much poorer.

So, in order to reduce the cost of living you would need to invest in Solar Power or wind power or another energy source other than Oil.

Why?

Because oil is going to be more and more expensive to bring up out of the ground because there is less and less of it available over time. So, this will tend to keep driving up the cost of living to unmanageable levels eventually for even the middle Class of the world and this also will cause some or all of the poor to starve. This is inevitable given the costs of drilling for oil and pumping it up to the surface as long as we are using oil for power in any form whether it is gasoline, diesel, kerosene, natural gas, propane or any other form related to oil that comes out of the ground, even coal bases of reserves converted to some oil form. In some ways I think coal is a form of hardened Oil until it becomes rock like.

So, the only way I see to reduce the cost of living, manufacturing or growing or harvesting food or transporting whatever you buy is to be using another source for power than an oil based source.

One way gas and diesel prices are kept lower is by people driving all electric vehicles