GASOLINE A CHANGED PARADIGM
by Stephen Tetreault
June 9, 2008

A changed paradigm: As I have written about many times during the past several years; and the contagion matrix has shown that I have been dead-on…. American's as bleeding red at the gas-pumps....So I want to reiterate this premise again as I believe it is worth understanding just how negatively impacted that the middle-class and poorer Americans are , its purely it again to illustrate just how expensive gasoline getting really getting for the average consumer in America; many are facing pure-anguish and its really hurting their families income and spending on vital substances like heat, food, clothing etc.! 

The premise is as follow; I want you to switch your paradigm (vantage-point) for this illustration. This what I call my “gasoline un-affordability index,” which provides a real-life comparison as to how much gasoline the average American worker can buy for every hour worked when compared over-time; and I doubt that you will ever see this matrix on the various bubblevision networks. As it paints a very dismal economic picture and often very negative outlook if you really think about it. 

According to current stats the average prices at the pump is currently averaging about $3.99-4.30 a gallon (I believe gasoline can rise to $4.85-5.25 or better this year) which means that according to a very basic and simple math formula we get the following data. 

As according to the labor department’s release on 6/06/2008 …The average American worker will now be able to buy only about 3.77 gallons for every hour worked; Now how do I come up with that figure; its simple math as the recent labor-department report stated that the average weekly wage for the month of April 2008 was $604.58 (up a mere $11.15 from the level of 593.43 from the same period in 2007, as such its easily to see how the average American has not kept up with inflation, but that is another story); we take this data and divided it by an average 40-hour work week, and it equates to approximately $15.11 per hour…. now I divided that number by a conservative $4.00 cost of a gallon of gasoline at the current low end-pump-rate); Now at first blush the numbers do not show any remarkable trend…however lets do a backward comparison; as when we do this we see a massive contagion as this number is down considerable from the figures calculated with 2004’s years data as the average American could afford 9.45 gallons per hour worked when gasoline was trending at $1.78 a gallon and what is even more dramatic is that back just 8+/-years ago the affordability ratio came in at 14.2 gallons per hour worked when gasoline was averaging $0.94-0.98 a gallon. Well I hope I hope that this matrix hasn’t sent you into a mass-depressive state…but as you can see from the data; the Average-American is working more than 3.78 times the number hours to buy the same quantity of gasoline that they did just over 8-years ago before the big-oil men came into power; and failed to implement sound energy policies that would lead us into becoming non-dependent on black-gold (but that is a story for another day); their policies are counter intuitive as we are suppose to be fighting the Bush-Wars against terror, in an effort to defeat those muslin radicals and nations that hate us but through their inaction and lackluster energy policies all we have been doing is making our enemies richer! 

© 2008 Stephen Tetreault
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Stephen Tetreault
T-Waves
Southern Maine, USA
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