1
1
1
by jczart
With the price of gas soaring sky-high, "economic murder" is committed at the gas
pump, according to poor helpless consumers who cried their heart out in protest
but can do nothing to prevent this perceived pricing anomaly as oil companies
and retailers dominating the market cabal in jacking up the prices of gasoline at
will.
An
old-timer named Jack, a dismayed gas consumer, complained about his agony in
coping with the rising prices of fuel. He confided to me right after he barely
filled up the tank of his 2007 Toyota Matrix car with $56 worth of premium
gasoline at a nearby Shell gas station paying $4.71 a gallon. He estimated that
this full gas tank would hardly last a week if he will use his car every day on
a regular basis.
As of the day this article is written, gas prices per gallon in El Cajon City, Southern California, where Jack and I live, are as
follows: Average, $4.44; Lowest, $4.31, and the Highest at $4.71 is almost
reaching the $5.00 a gallon mark this early part of the year. This
highest retail price of gasoline tells
it all.
Since prices of gasoline per gallon are unlikely to go down for at least a month from now -- and could still even go up -- I did the numbers for Jack and his wife Eunice so that they could see clearly the reason for their budgetary torment: The couple, who live alone by themselves in a rented two-bedroom apartment, would pay a total of $224 [$56 x 4] for their gasoline consumption this month if they would just drive around town for errands and/or driving to and from work.
However, I assured Jack and his wife, and
put their doubts to rest that they would still pay more than just $224 at the
gas pump this month when he and his wife visit friends out of town and spend a
weekend with their families as they normally do. Their gasoline consumption
would rise in tandem with the price of gas per gallon as this continues to
gallop sky high and create an ugly gaping hole in their pocket.
Thus Jack moaned with frustration as he
tells his friends of his encounter with the third kind [a shocker] at the gas
pump " that this sore experience in the gas pump had "killed" their regular household
budget at least for this month of February.
If Jack and his wife have to literally stay alive for this month of
February as they screamed "economic
murder" at the gas pump, out of desperation, my guess is that in fact they
might not survive at all.
There's a strong possibility that this admirable and friendly, soft-spoken, elderly and
in poor health couple -- they are now physically weak at their late 80s, sickly and barely
surviving just a little bit above this country's poverty line-- may not make it.
"With our meager income and medical problems to attend to, we have to live on a very tight budget,"
Jack, a jobless retired
engineer, bellyached his predicament. His elderly spouse has a menial job that
pays a minimum daily wage, with a little social security to boot but still not
enough to pay the monthly rent.
"When
our total income is summed up, those standard Federal and State aid
requirements do not make us eligible to receive any housing benefits and food
stamps," Jack griped.
They are just an iota over and above the Poverty
Guidelines for food stamps. For example, the poverty guideline starting from the year 2009, was
$903 per month ($10,830 per year) for a single person, plus $312 per month for
Jack's wife. To be eligible for food stamp, their monthly income should not be
more than $1,215 [See SNAP -- Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance Program ], although obviously it doesn't make any difference at
all if their monthly gross income is only a couple of hundred dollars more over
the poverty line.
In
our conversation, I did not press this income issue on Jack to avoid the
ignominy of further embarrassment, but my suspicion is that in spite of their financial
difficulties, Jack and his wife are too proud to beg the government for any pecuniary
assistance gratis et amore.
But other than pride, there could also be
some political reasons behind this mulishness or resistance to receive charity
or to be subjected to public entreaty like those economically disadvantaged are
under Obama's controversial social amelioration program for the underprivileged.
I know that Jack and Eunice are both
die-hard Republicans who did not vote for Obama. As a matter of principles, like
Jack and his wife, there are also millions of poor Americans who believe that they
have no reason to thank Obama for his socialistic welfare program of
redistributing the wealth of the rich to all the suffering poor across the
country.
In effect,
this senior couple, like millions of their kind, has barely enough for their
basic necessities; the little money they have mostly goes to pay for their
elongated list of medicines they can't survive without. To them the medications
that their primary care physician had prescribed for their advance age so that
they may live longer, are no doubt just as important as their basic need of a roof
over their head, clothing on their back, and food in their stomach.
I know a little bit more about Jack's
personal background that his other friends don't. In life, Jack has a proud
core value of our American freedom of choice. In his younger days, he was one
of those young activists that marched down the streets nationwide during those
earlier protests at the conclusion of WWII against Big Government encroaching
into the problems and turmoil of Indochina [under the US-France Mutual Defense Act ] , until it ended in the decisive defeat of
France by Vietnam in The Battle of Dien Bien Phu
in May 1954. Jack recalls the
objectionable stigma of a people's choice to be free from foreign domination in
this war which was notoriously known in Europe and to local anti-war protesters
as the decade's "Dirty War" [ First Indochinese War ] that
disgraced France supported by the United States while at the same time this
nation was then confronting Russia, China and later on North Korea in Gen.
Douglas MacArthur's military grand design to nuke China [see MacArthur wanted to drop nuclear bombs in Manchuria ] to
end the war that just broke out in the Korean Peninsula .
1 | 2
