From the AP:
There’s less money this summer for hotel rooms, surfboards and bathing suits. It’s all going into the gas tank.
High prices at the pump are putting a squeeze on the family budget as the traditional summer driving season begins. For every $10 the typical household earns before taxes, almost a full dollar now goes toward gas, a 40 percent bigger bite than normal.
Households spent an average of $369 on gas last month. In April 2009, they spent just $201. Families now spend more filling up than they spend on cars, clothes or recreation. Last year, they spent less on gasoline than each of those things…
The recent drop in gasoline prices will help on this, but I believe the reprieve is temporary. This is because the Federal Reserve will, in my view, likely do some sort of “quantitative easing” after the current round ends in June…just can’t afford, in the bankster view, a risk to Obama’s re-election effort. Stop the money printing and we slide back in to full-blown recession…so, something will be done to keep the “free” money flowing to the banks…and thus to commodities, like oil. The bottom line, though, is that people are having to spend more for the basics than they did before – and for some people the amount they spend for the necessities is coming out of a lower overall budget. This means that there is less money to spend on non-essentials…like vacations, new cars and a replacement washer/dryer.
The damage is in large measure already done – just as the damage of $4 a gallon gasoline in 2008 didn’t show up for several months, so will this current bit of damage not show up in the official statistics for a little while. Think of the Spring’s run up in gasoline prices as a sudden tax increase – and a tax increase which fell most heavily on the poor and middle class. The worst part of it is that this was generated by an effort to save the wealth of those who have the very most – and, yes, it was a bi-partisan effort, but it was massively advanced by liberals like Obama; the GOP, for the most part, seems to have learned its lesson. The Democrats haven’t – or, at least, they simply don’t care because their entire focus is on winning the White House in 2012, and if it takes policies which will bankrupt us in 2013, it is a price they are willing to have us pay.
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