| Today I came this close to trading in my car for a Vespa scooter. It seemed the only viable option,
given the outrageous gas prices these days. Then I gave the situation a little
thought, and I
realized that, in reality, I’m not spending much more for gas now than I
was a few months ago. On
average, I fill my tank once a week, and it used to cost me about twenty
dollars. Today when I filled
my tank, it cost me about thirty dollars.
For those of you who
recently graduated from our fine American public school system, that makes
a difference of about ten dollars a week. I’ll admit, there are other things
I’d rather spend my money on, but ten dollars a week is not about to bring
me to my knees. For all you
smokers out there, ten dollars is just about two packs of cigarettes
(assuming you smoke the name-brand cancer sticks instead of the
store-brand kind). It’s also
about four cups of coffee from Starbucks, and I know there are a
lot of you coffee drinkers out there.
And it’s not just
coffee drinkers and smokers.
The difference in price might mean ten Little Debbie’s cakes, or a
few scratch-off lottery tickets.
Whatever. My point is,
if we would all adjust our budgets just a little bit, and stop buying the
little non-essential odds and ends at the convenience store, we could make
the bite of the gas hike a little less
painful.
“But what about those
of us who don’t drive a nice economical sports car?” you ask. “What about those of us who drive
a four bedroom house on wheels?”
To you I say downsize or live with it. If you’re spending eighty dollars
per fill-up and you’re filling up four times a week, maybe you’re driving
outside your means. After
all, the new GMC Colossus XL you just bought only gets four miles to the
gallon, and who really needs an SUV with a full-size bathroom, complete
with a baby-changing station and an attendant named Lars? You were probably spending
somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty-five dollars per-fill-up before, as
opposed to eighty-five dollars now.
To be sure, this is a lot of money, but hey, nobody’s making you
drive an oil derrick to work.
“But I need my Chevy
Goliath all terrain vehicle with a Hemi-powered V-28 engine, and optional
mountaineer package to get Timmy, Bobby and little Becky Sue to school.”
you say. And I say fiddle
sticks! Or I would, if it
didn’t make me sound so gay.
You don’t need any of that.
How many times have you encountered Mount Kilimanjaro on your way
to the grocery store? And
even so, was the sherpa option really necessary? The mileage you receive in your
vehicle is actually measured in gallons per mile. When parked in your driveway, it
looks like the QEII has run aground in front of your house. I could go on and
on.
Let me tell you a
little story. My parents had
three children. They were
able to get us to and from school, pick up groceries, go to work, and
still take a fun trip or two, all in a Pontiac Bonneville. Granted, the car was only slightly
smaller than the QEII itself, but it had far less interior
space than any of today’s SUVs.
This was in the 70’s; when the closest thing to an SUV was the Ford
Bronco. It was also a time
when, thanks to the unshakable leadership of one Jimmah Cahtah (spoken
with an insipid southern drawl), the country was in the midst of a
crippling gas shortage.
My point here is: you
don’t need your SUV, you want your SUV. And I’m sure there were many
things my parents wanted, but they realized that they had to make
sacrifices for the good of the family. But that just doesn’t happen
anymore. Does anybody
remember taking a long trip with the family in which you talked or played
the license plate game, instead of popping in a DVD to shut the kids up
and putting on your own headset to drown out even the slightest hint of a
spoken word? Downsize. Your kids don’t each need their
own row of seats in the back of the truck. Downsize. Make them sit together in a
smaller space, and maybe it will bring you all closer together as a
family.
There has been a lot
of talk in recent weeks about everybody banding together as a nation to
drive the gas prices down by refusing to buy gas on a certain day. If only there was a world where
that would work. You see, oil
companies, just like Wal-Mart, KFC and your local mom and pop hardware
store, are a business. This
means they are out to make money so the hundreds of thousands of people
they employ can continue to bring home a paycheck. Put them out of business and a lot
of hard-working people lose their jobs. You see, it’s not all about the
evil Big Oil tycoons, it’s about the little guys like you and me
who work for them.
The fact of the matter
is, a lot of people are making a lot of money off you and me at the gas
pump and everywhere else in America.
And it’s not the oil tycoons, it’s our elected officials in
Washington. They keep taxing
the gas, driving the price thru the roof, and we scream about how the oil
companies are screwing us.
But on a three dollar gallon of gas, the oil companies make about
nine cents. And they’re the
ones drilling for it, shipping it, bringing it to our friendly
neighborhood gas station, and in some cases, pumping it into our damn car
for us!
And what does the
government do to earn the right to keep taxing it? Nothing! We ask the government to step in
and make the oil companies lower their prices, but it’s the government
that’s driving the price up in the first place! The only thing the government has
ever been good at is taxing people.
When will we learn that?
People had better take
a refresher course in basic economics. When you force a company to forego
profits for the good of the people you get socialism, and you get a lot of
people out of work. And
pretty soon, the company can’t afford to supply the gas anymore, and then
who’s going to get it for you?
Uncle Sam? Teddy
Kennedy? Nancy Pelosi? Hell, she can’t even get a decent
Botox injection. Wake up
America, or you might just find yourself taking the kids to school on your
brand new Vespa.
-Freddie
Banjo
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