"The Other America": at the pump
It’s instructive to go back to the numbers now and then.
At today’s prices (say, $4.00 per gallon), a year’s worth of gas for a two-car family that together drives 30,000 miles annually, with cars averaging 20 miles per gallon, will cost about $6100. A year-and-a-half ago, with prices around $2.20, that was about $3300. That’s an increase of $2800 in a mere 18 months.
With a median family making about $48,000 per year, with, say, take-home pay of $40,000, gasoline in many cases now consumes over 15% of take-home pay. That’s gasoline. Not repairs or maintenance, monthly payments or depreciation on the car. Just gasoline. In early 2007, it was bad enough: over 8% of median take-home pay – for gasoline only. The increase alone in that time is about 7%.
But hey, get another job that’s closer. Jobs grow on trees these days, don’t they? Switch to public transportation, which will get plentiful in the U.S. one of these centuries. Anyway, those median incomes are growing fast, too, so . . . . Oh, well, never mind!
Half of all Americans, about 150,000,000 people, are in families that make less than the median. Duhhh, but then it's easy to forget. The bottom 40% -- almost half of all Americans, about 120 million of them – take home somewhere in the neighborhood of $30,000 per year. If that 30,000 miles is a necessity, you’re stuck paying about 20% of all your available family income on gasoline.
Something's not quite right with this picture, don't you think?
At today’s prices (say, $4.00 per gallon), a year’s worth of gas for a two-car family that together drives 30,000 miles annually, with cars averaging 20 miles per gallon, will cost about $6100. A year-and-a-half ago, with prices around $2.20, that was about $3300. That’s an increase of $2800 in a mere 18 months.
With a median family making about $48,000 per year, with, say, take-home pay of $40,000, gasoline in many cases now consumes over 15% of take-home pay. That’s gasoline. Not repairs or maintenance, monthly payments or depreciation on the car. Just gasoline. In early 2007, it was bad enough: over 8% of median take-home pay – for gasoline only. The increase alone in that time is about 7%.
But hey, get another job that’s closer. Jobs grow on trees these days, don’t they? Switch to public transportation, which will get plentiful in the U.S. one of these centuries. Anyway, those median incomes are growing fast, too, so . . . . Oh, well, never mind!
Half of all Americans, about 150,000,000 people, are in families that make less than the median. Duhhh, but then it's easy to forget. The bottom 40% -- almost half of all Americans, about 120 million of them – take home somewhere in the neighborhood of $30,000 per year. If that 30,000 miles is a necessity, you’re stuck paying about 20% of all your available family income on gasoline.
Something's not quite right with this picture, don't you think?
posted by KISSWeb | 2:30 PM
1 Comments:
This zeros in on a microeconomic theory of consumption given too little attention. This is so important, a blog on this is irresistable.
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