I got a tankful of gas yesterday. It was $4.59 a gallon and my tank holds right at 15 gallons...so about $70 for a fill-up. I drive somewhat conservatively the more gas goes up and I average about 34 mpg combined in my 2018 Honda Accord, so a tankful buys me about 500-520 miles of range. That puts my effective cost at 7.28 miles per dollar. My daily commute is 48 miles door to door round trip. I work a hybrid schedule called 9/8/80 I am in the office 9 times per pay period, with 1x8 and 8x9 hour shifts - giving me a 3-day weekend every other week (and every other Friday off) - to be honest, this grew out of the COVID-19 era and its the ONE THING that happened from 2020 to 2024 that I actually like still!
So how does gas prices ripple through the economy? Easy... at $70 per fill-up, I spend exactly $0 on snacks, incidentals, coffees, sodas, or anything else in the gas station. My guilty pleasure of a lottery ticket every so often also dries up. My spending outside of the gas dwindles to $0.00, no economic activity, no money velocity, dead stop. This by itself does not do much...until I look around and see foot traffic into the convenience store attached to the gas station is now a ghost town too. As is the empty fast food restaurant attached to it. Now comes the acceleration - these places start to cut hours and jobs as business slows to a crawl. Those people, already on the margins of eking out a living, are now in dire straits. They are struggling to make rent and eat when the economy is not tanking...now? They are drowning and they are also taking more economic velocity of money movement out with them.
This continues as gas prices swell further. Boating and water recreation vehicles? At $6 a gallon? Not happening... Rentals of these units on beach resorts dries up and more seasonal work is lost to squeeze even harder on those dependent on the summer months to survive through the winter months. And on and on it goes...
Parents who used to hire a local teen to babysit and have a date night? Not when gas hits $7 a gallon and dinner tops 2 bills ($200) without a bottle of wine or desserts.
Teens - he reliable consumers who spend 110% of their incomes? They lose jobs first and that puts MORE pressure on businesses as the consumers disappear and the jobs that support them also go belly up.
Daycare costs rise and the pass-on further stresses families with kids in day care... or adult parents in adult centers. Now its getting really ugly.
Food costs - already out of control - begin to press really hard as beef tops $15 a pound and pork hits $10 and chickens are now selling for more by the week. Eggs are unaffordable at $12 a dozen and milk becomes similarly unattainable to many at over $8 a gallon. A family of four scratching out an existence at $150 a week for groceries is now looking at $275 a week and cutting everything everywhere else. Cable TV or streaming services? Dropped. Online purchases? Gone.
Not all of this is bad in the abstract - we DO buy a lot of junk and waste a lot of money in the process... but in the aggregate its catastrophic. Foreclosures and defaults rise to crisis levels. Car sales evaporate to nothing. Lending to consumers is finished and the banks are in full panic and liquidity crises again.
Any of this sound familiar?
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/leafhandler.ashx?n=pet&s=emm_epmr_pte_nus_dpg&f=m
June 2008 $4 a gallon
June 2022 $5 a gallon
June 2008 contributed to the complete collapse of the sub-prime mortgage sector and the near total collapse of the world economy.
June 2022 was the COVID-19 inflation bubble that torpedoed Biden's economy (in the eyes of the voters) and led directly to a second Trump term (which is STILL unfathomable but real)...
Gas prices at the levels we are hitting now are unsustainable in the frame of reference of gar-culture suburban America. Our cities are largely unwalkable, our suburbs and exurbs are 100% non-livable without access to transportation. Our wealth distribution inequality, our healthcare crisis, our daycare crisis and our student debt / consumer debt crisis are all at nonsurvivable levels.
At the guy in charge is talking like a school yard bully right before he gets punched square in the jaw.
= new reply since forum marked as read
