Gas Prices Are a Scapegoat for Our Strained Budgets

With gas prices on the march upward, conversations turn to hushed murmurs about $4 gas, holiday weekend price hikes, and worries about the future. There's a lot of talk and even more speculation.

Those companies that profit from the sale of gas are seen as oppressors, and "someone should step in and do something". A quick analogy might be to compare them to drug dealers. We are hooked and now we'll do anything to get their product. But there are other costs in life that have gone up with little or no fanfare.

Cars are so expensive, and we don't own them - they own us. Month after month costs of payments and repairs take a large chunk out of our budgets, but we never question it. Cars suck the life out of us before we even turn the engine on to burn gas: taxes for roads, insurance, oil changes...the list goes on and on.

Technology changes and we have to spend, spend, spend in response to it. For example, take the change from the VCR to the DVD player. Yes, it's progress, and yes, I can skip ahead to the good part in the movie with much less effort. But a DVD player was something I didn't know I needed until it came out and became more common. Had it never been created, I'd still be watching tapes and my quality of life would be no different.

Things that were once considered luxuries are now considered necessities. Today almost everyone owns a cell phone. It's just expected. If I had to give up my cell phone tomorrow, my life would be inconvenienced not one bit. But it's one of those things everyone has, so you don't question it. You spend more time trying to get the best deal than deciding whether or not you need it.

It makes me nervous to think of it: what things that are considered "luxuries" today will be considered "necessities" tomorrow? Ten years from now I'll have a microchip embedded in my tooth that organizes all my info and places phone calls for me with the blink of an eye, and it will cost who knows what. Some other consumable good, like clean drinking water, will go up. And when you tune in to the nightly news from a holographic screen projected from your forehead, you can listen to them wringing their hands about it.

The future has never looked so familiar.