Mr. Pappagiorgio DOT COM

I think we can pretty much all agree that there are very few “Middle-Class” people left in America, and I would definitely consider myself “low-class” with the salary I currently make. And lets face it, when you don’t have much money, how do you live your life? Paycheck to paycheck, and generally outside your means, obviously not everybody, but most people that don’t make much money spend every penny of what they get. The state of the economy in this country is just going straight down the tubes, and why? I personally believe, gas prices, more than just about anything else is affecting the economy because its keeping those of us “low-class” citizens with a hell of a lot less money than we would have had 5 years ago. Click inside for some interesting scenarios on how much gas prices affect most of us.

Lets just take my situation for instance. I live just outside the city of Tulsa, and we have refineries cross town, so generally we have some of the lowest prices in the country, and currently it sits at $3.39. Now I started driving when I was 16 and a half, roughly ten years ago, and that summer I remember filling up at Quick Trip down the street from my house for $0.79 / Gallon. I remember thinking then, “I’ll never in my life ever fill up at this low a price.” I don’t know why that would even cross the mind of a 16 year old kid, but it did, and I haven’t seen it since.

So lets get into a little bit of Math here. For years the gas price was in the low $1 range, lets just go with $1.19. My truck holds 19 Gallons, and because I live 17 miles away from work, and my truck gets 17 miles per gallon, I go through 2 gallons per day just to get to work and back, and on top of that I have to drive a minimum of 4 miles while at work, and potentially up to 16. But usually 4, so lets say I’m driving 38 miles per day. So if we take my tank size x miles per gallon, we get roughly 323 miles before bone dry empty. So if we divide that by minimum driving requirements of 38 miles per day, I can go 8.5 days before filling up, or basically 4 fillups a month. But for good measure, and because no one can only drive to work and back, we’ll add in another fillup throughout the month. Five fillups, at the current price of $3.39 a gallon, and 19 gallons per fillup equal a whopping $322.05 a month. A MONTH! By contrast if we did the same thing at $1.19, we come out with $113.05.

So basically a loss of $200 a month, and for low-income people, thats catastrophic, and I’d consider myself on the high end of the low-class. Forget about people who make the minimum wage…or wait, lets not. Currently the minimum wage in this country is a paultry $6.55 an hour, and don’t kid yourself, millions of Americans make this wage. So 40 hours a week, translates to an average of $1135.33 per month income, and thats BEFORE TAXES! So take out $322.05 for gas, and now your sitting at $813.28, to live off of, again, thats not including state and federal taxes that the government takes.

Now, I’m not gonna use accurate numbers here, but lets just have some fun. There is somewhere around 300 million people in this country, so lets just say 80 million of those are in a similar situation as me, lets see how much more money would be in the economy. $16,720,000,000 would be the amount, yes, almost 17 BILLION Dollars, and thats probably a conservative estimate.

Now keep in mind I don’t know shit from anything, I’m just throwing this out there as how a typical low-class income person is looking at the gas situation, and don’t even get me started on Diesel and it being over $4 a gallon and what it will do to the trucking industry and eventually everything else.

In my mind its the most IMPORTANT issue out there during this political process and I don’t think I have heard anybody even really mention it or a plan on what to do to fix it. Meanwhile Big Oil keeps getting richer, reporting record profits every year. Somethings wrong with that, and its all of us that are paying that price.