The news about fuel costs, the endless lament, a conversation of extraordinary whining regarding the insane expense of filling a tank, this nonsense must stop because who really cares?

When gas costs $3.50 a gallon (such as back during this past January), the natives rest easy, but at $5.40 a gallon (current price as of today in Arizona), we have a national emergency. Give me a break. How can this panic be real when reality says this is NOTHING unless one considers it a distraction? The average roundtrip to and from work in the United States appears to be about 41 miles per day. The average fuel economy across America right now is a hair under 25 miles per gallon.

Using those numbers requires 1.64 gallons of gasoline for the daily commute. So, back in January, it cost approximately $5.75 to get to and from work, while today, it now costs $8.86 or $3.10 more per day than it did back at the beginning of the year.

By land area, Phoenix, Arizona, is the 6th largest city in the continental United States. A ridiculous commute from the north edge of the Phoenix area in Carefree south to the border of the Gila River Indian Reservation in south Chandler would amount to 43 miles in each direction or 86 miles roundtrip. For this long haul, you’d be spending $18.58 per day with gas at $5.40 per gallon unless you drove my 2019 Kia Niro hybrid, in which case it would be a $9.29 outlay.

My point is that very few people can lay claim to 100-mile-per-day commutes, even here in America’s 6th largest city, and if they are doing that using some large pickup truck, that’s an error in judgment, and besides, only 15% of pickups are used for work so please don’t toss that red herring at me.

For those who earn on the low end of the pay scale, sure, this hurts them, but not as much as higher rents do, and NOBODY is talking about that.

So let’s venture into the low-pay situation; someone I know works about 9 miles away from the coffee shop she works at. Her 2001 Jeep Cherokee, on a good day, gets 17 miles per gallon; so back in January, she was spending $3.50 to get to and from work, while today it’s approaching $5.50, and there are those who are trying to argue that this extra $2.00 is the straw that is breaking the camel’s back. If she works 22 days per month, she’s incurring an extra expense of $44 due to today’s cost of gas, but her rent increased by $300 a month, just as ours did. Yet the government has the audacity to call for a gas tax holiday that only adds $0.18 per gallon., I wonder what someone like this woman would do with the extra $5.40 per month she’d be saving? Oh, I know, she’d apply it to her rent.

The 2022 median wage in America is $16.50 per hour or $13.90 after tax. The national median price for a one-bedroom apartment was $1,216 back in 2019, meaning someone needed to earn $21 an hour back then to afford a small apartment, but instead of discussing wage inequality, we blame greedy oil companies and lay fault at the gas pump as being the boogyman ruining our ability to afford life. What a sham.