gasoline prices

GreyHawk's picture

Wage-Guzzling Gas Prices

Posted Wed, 06/11/2008 - 07:41 by GreyHawk
Hat-tip to SaraBeth for pointing out the obvious and spurring this blurb.

Here's one legacy that George W. Bush can't be too proud of: too little, too late for the average minimum wage worker. The top line shows the percentage of the minimum wage that gasoline prices are eating into -- namely, it's an increasing percentage of a hourly worker's take-home pay, leaving the worker with less than before. Note that while the federal minimum wage increases in July, I've held gas prices stagnant at $4.03/gallon -- something unlikely to prove true. Also, the federal minimum wage increases again in July of 2009 -- to $7.25 -- which reduces the percentage from 61.66 to 55.71 percent. The numbers still aren't stellar: they put the worker back to the equivalent of the second quarter of 2007, when the faltering economy was already starting to bite further into average budgets across both food and fuel prices. This is the legacy of eight years of Republican manglement management of our federal government.

GreyHawk's picture

Gouged Out: The Consumer and the Gas Station Operator

Posted Fri, 04/25/2008 - 06:01 by GreyHawk

Thursday, 24 April 2004, CNN Money ran an interesting article called Gouging myth out of gas1 that further explained how the myth that gas stations participate in "price gouging" is unlikely, at best -- and it casts an eye toward the primary culprit through the use of some very interesting facts and figures.
Image created by GreyHawk using Microsoft Excel, based on the percentages provided in the article.2
Note: Excel automatically changed the 72% to 71% because the total of the figures provided added up to 101, not 100. According to the article, some people assumed that gas station owners get a bigger slice of the approximately $3.50 per gallon than they actually do -- but several suspected something much closer to the truth.