I think Dickens had it pegged perfectly for those who wonder why another 25 or 50 cents a gallon makes such a difference even for people who don't drive all that much:
"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds, nineteen shillings and sixpence, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds and sixpence, result misery."
What the hullabaloo says is that enough families in the US are so tightly budgeted that this kind of money may make the different between treading water and sinking, between a reasonable lifestyle and just hanging on.
If you drive a thousand miles a month in a car that gets 20 miles to the gallon, 50 extra cents a gallon is 25 bucks. That's enough over the course of a year to float the interest on something close to five grand of credit-card debt. (Or maybe it's just your once-a-month trip to the movies down the drain, forever.)
If you commute an hour each way every day in that same car, take $10,000 of the price of the house you can afford. Or stop saving for your kid's college education.
Of course, gas would probably have to go up by another buck or two a gallon before it made economic sense to just leave your current car by the side of the road and buy a new fuel-efficnet model.
Posted by wallich at April 17, 2005 08:08 PM