JumpStart by Robb Armstrong for July 05, 2022

No more Mom-Taxi, start walking kiddo

My earliest recollection is .32 cents/gal in 1972 or ’73, when I walked to the corner gas station to fill a 1 gallon can for the lawn mower. In 1980 I got a car with a bigger engine and remember gas hitting $1.00/gal at the same time.

Welp. In ’63 there were gas was all around the LA area: 22¢ per gal.

Now, our taxes alone are three times that!

Makes me wish I’d bought a few billion gallons when I had the chance….wait, I never had the chance. It would have required money.

($4.259 in Atmore, Alabama tonight.)

22.51 no wait 23.18 SEK per liter (using my co ops price list) that’s 2.21 USD per liter which is 10 USD per gallon. In Sweden. Diesel is more. But my co op just sent me about 70 USD so I can still run down to the old hometown once a week to play volleyball.

Robb, you haven’t been in Philly lately. GasBuddy shows around $4.79/gallon in the “Greater Northeast” part of the city, and that’s with our 2nd highest gas tax in the nation. By the way, 2 cops were shot at the fireworks display at the Art Museum last night. One barely missed getting killed when his head was grazed (they found the bullet in his hat), and a suburban sheriff’s deputy was hit in the shoulder.

That’s just per gallon…now multiply it by the number of gallons in their vehicle…

Six bucks per gallon, sweetie. Now, do the math.

I hate inflation.

I bought a coal burner just in time!

Kids have no concept of the value of money, or how expensive daily life is.

My indicator for inflation is the full-sized candy bar. The price keeps going up, but in a smoother fashion than gas or housing. in 1962, a buck bought you 20 of them!

a gallon kiddo… maybe it’s best she don’t know.

when my buddy back in RI turned 16, i put $3 of gas in his corvair, and filled the tank

Perspective is everything

I remember the outrage when gas went to 75 cents, and then the trouble with gas pumps that did not have an extra digit available when it went to a buck.

I remember my grandmother handing me a fiver and having me go into the gas station to hand it over to tell the attendant which pump to put it on, and that filled up the ol’ Oldsmobile for the week. This weekend we filled up our old RAV4 and it took around $50 which will hopefully make it a week, but with my husbands commute, maybe not.

It’s not just about the raw price, it’s about how fast it’s been shooting up – sometimes a jump of 20 cents in a single week!

What would Jack Benny and his Maxwell say?

But you can’t just buy one (gallon)

Six bucks? That was last week. Now it’s eight bucks.

little girls look cute in orange life jackets

this is the condition we call “stupid rich”

I’m not learned enough to speak the ins, outs and intricacies of pay and taxes and market value and all. All I know is that in 1974, my wife and I, on the $5.50 an hour and $6.10 and hr we made respectively, we were able to afford a lot more, do more, than we could for the same amount now. We had a 2 bedroom apartment, each had our own car, went out to the movies or bowling once a week, didn’t worry about the price of gas against what we could afford to eat.

Says the little girl who didn’t fork out $80 to fill up the tank!

OK, tough people. There’s a war on. Do you want to appease today’s Hitler, or are you willing to put up with some pain? You can put up with high prices, so that you can have all the gas you want if you’re well-off, or —how about this? RATION GASOLINE.