Originally Posted by
Hobbit
Ok, so I keep hearing all of this griping and whining about gas prices, and it seems to be all people care about, but you know what? It doesn't matter, and politicians who want to take all of your money love seeing you not only distracted by this, but wanting them to do something about it. Let's do some math here.
In 2004, the average gas milage of a brand new car was 24.7 mpg. In 1980, it was 23.1 mpg. Those aren't very even numbers, so I'm rounding it to 20. According to the AAA, one year ago the price of regular was $2.929. Today that price is $3.114. That's a difference of 18.5 cents/gallon over the last year, but once again, let's just round that up to 20 cents. Now, let's suppose you drive your family 1400 to Disney World and back. At 20 mpg, that's 70 gallons of gas...a whole $14 difference from last year. HOLY SH*T! How the hell are you going to cram that extra $14 into your budget?! It'll RUIN you!
Okay, let's set aside the sarcasm for a minute and move on to the daily commute. Stop and go traffic reduces gas milage, so we'll change our gas milage to a measly 15 mpg. The average commute is 16 miles, or 32 miles for the round trip. That's a little over 2 gallons. At 18.5 cents more per gallon over last year, that comes out to about $2.00 per week. Assuming two weeks for vacation, that's a grand total of $100 per year. You probably spend 10 times that much on coffee. Skip one latte a week and substitute a mug from the office pot and voila! You've covered the gas increase.
Now, let's look at something nobody seems to be worried about, Social Security. The only reason this escapes notice is because money for Social Security is taken away from you before you ever see it. So anyway, every week, the government takes, by force, about 14% of your paycheck and contributes it to a socialized retirement program. That program is failing and is in for an inevitable implosion within the next couple of decades, meaning it is highly unlikely that you will ever see a dime, and if you die too early, you have no say in where that money goes. Somebody else gets it. Now, the average yearly household income is around $66,000 per year. For the sake of argument, I'm going to assume this is pre-tax income rather than take-home pay. It currently costs such a household $9240/year, 92 times the gas increase for the daily commute, to float a federal income redistribution program that was never intended to be permanent and is doomed for total collapse. And that's just SS. I could go on for hours over how twice that much is confiscated to be spend on bridges to nowhere, farm subsidies, and the failed War on Drugs.
So quit bitching about gas prices and try solving some real problems.