Once again, people are focusing on the wrong thing

I have been thinking about the rising price of gasoline lately -- not because I particularly want to, but because the media and social media are obsessed with it. As usual, it's occurred to me that as the meme suggests the problem really isn't that the prices are climbing. The problem is that too many people are getting paid shit wages. If you're on the low end of the income scale and living pay day to pay day even a minor bump up in your expenses is going to cause pain. 

I say "as usual" because every time the price of gas goes up enough to be noticeable I start hearing complaints from people that they're going to have a hard time keeping the tank filled so they can get to work or they're going to have to figure out what food item they can do without. I tend to believe that if paying $5 or $10 more to be able to get to work is going to destroy your budget you are either (a) incredibly bad at budgeting or (b) severely underpaid. 

Using myself as an example and being a person who doesn't drive a gas hog, I figured that if I was still working at my old job, the one with maybe a 5-mile round trip if I decided to drive to the salt mine instead of taking the MARTA bus, I'd end having to fill the gas tank every 12 or 13 days or so. The Focus has a 13-gallon tank, maybe. Think the most it's ever required at one feeding was about 12 gallons after the little low fuel warning lit up on the dashboard. So maybe my commute wasn't typical of the usual urbanite, so let's double the numbers. (I see people whining about long commutes if the drive takes more than 15 minutes, so one assumes most people don't actually have to drive much farther than I did.) Thinking big, maybe instead of only needing about 24 gallons per month for getting to work and running errands, I needed 48. Because I can be weirdly obsessive about some things, I took the time to do back through our credit union statements and found how much I paid a year ago and compared it with what I'm paying now. 

The numbers: rounding for the sake of ease of playing with this particular word problem, a year ago it cost me $20 to fill up the car. Yesterday it cost me $30. One does not need to be Ada Lovelace to recognize this is a 50 percent increase. So if I was still working, I'd be paying about $60 a month instead of $40, a $20 jump that would annoy me but not have me freaking out and coming up with conspiracy theories blaming whoever the current occupant of the White House happened to be. On the other hand, when I was working as a government office drone I made a decent (if not spectacular) salary so I might not even notice the increase very much. But if I were one of the poor saps working for the legal minimum wage, that added $20 expense really might mean opting for more creative ways to make pasta appetizing instead of being able to indulge in some decent protein. 

Or maybe it's just being old enough to remember when gas prices were also higher than anyone liked, 14 years ago when Bush the Younger was in office. It's hard to be upset by something when you've already seen worse. 

However, on the gripping hand, what would have me wondering and perhaps doing mini-rants about corporate greed would be noticing that two gas stations on one side of Keweenaw Bay were selling regular gasoline for $4.29 per gallon while on the other side of the bay two stations had regular priced at $4.06 (23 cents cheaper) and station number 3 had regular for $3.86. That's a 43 cent difference. Why? I can understand prices differing by a few cents, but 43? For what it's worth, the lower-priced station is locally owned; the more expensive ones are corporate. 

Anyway, circling back to a point I meant to make a couple paragraphs ago, maybe instead of bitching about how much gas costs and proposing truly stupid ideas like eliminating gas taxes for awhile (right, like that's really going to help fix the potholes or keep bridges from falling down) there should be an emphasis on paying people more. People who earned a living wage wouldn't have to compare brands of ramen looking for the least expensive option.