My gas on gas.

I'm so desparate for material, I have now resorted to using comments from others' blogs as fodder for my own posts. Mostly because, in moments of glibness I find that I can make sense and partly because I feel as though I should have posted the comment as an essay on my own blog. So, this is what I left on Firestarter5's blog yesterday in response to his question about the rising cost of gasoline and how it affects our relations around the world:

I think (maybe) part of the problem is that we are so fat on our luxurious lifestyles here that the last straw was a big spike in oil prices. It means that we can no longer live our lives of bloated excess, and we now have to cut back on stuff that we either didn't have 20 years ago (cell phones and [big] mortgages) or have become accustomed to.

I think part of the problem is that we feel entitled to stuff, and when we are faced with the grim realization that our lives are full of wretched excess, the one thing that we have come to abuse and rely on - gasoline - is the thing that has now betrayed us and made us face our biggest issue ... that we are wasteful and spoiled.

That in itself would have made a decent post, but since it is a "comment" I felt it was best left to stand on its own. Here, I can be wordy, as you have become accustomed.

I found a price chart kept by a diligent person from Texas that I choose to believe because it proves my point. The most important line is the grey one at the bottom, the line that is "adjusted for inflation"...

What the chart says is that, since 2002, adjusted for inflation, the price of gasoline has steadily gone up, and in some years actually decreased. Now, however, in the face of growing financial difficulties, we are hearing about the price. It also says that during the 1990s we grew to depend on a flat-line price of gas and perhaps (as one would say) became spoiled and grew to abuse the substance because we figured that things would remain so.

The fact (if I can cloud the issue with facts) is that inflation has pushed the price of "stuff" up about 20 percent in the last 7 years. That, combined with growing pressure from property tax increases, personal income tax increases and the added issues of "convenience" items like cell phones, Internet service, cable TV and their related power consumption (i.e. electricity costs) and "little extras" like property taxes have combined to make the recent spike in oil prices intolerable. They are intolerable because (a) we have become spoiled by our wretched excesses and (b) we have become accustomed to those items which we didn't have in 2001 when the price started to rise. The recent spike in the price of gasoline is a relative last straw.

I don't see any big right-wing conspiracy (much as I'd like to) or any huge issue with middle-east conflict (which has existed since Year Zero) or any weather or Global Warming-related issues. What I do see is an overall rise in the cost of living, brought about by a myriad of mod-cons that we didn't have in the late 1990s, but since have become necessities.

Those things, in addition to our growing dependence on the vehicle and its tremendous size, have compounded to the point that any increase in the cost of fueling those vehicles is the financial "last straw" and has brought about the griping and complaining that we see and hear now.

It's simple economics. Allow people to grow accustomed to a lifestyle - take part of it and make it more costly - and watch them gripe about it. Now, we are faced with trying to find ways to justify our excessive lifestyle by trying to find ways to reduce the cost of something (traveling) that was already a bane to our existence. We are just now figuring it out because the other things are irreplaceable, or so we believe.

I don't think there's any more to it than that, conspiracy theories notwithstanding. It is a perfect storm of sorts.