Could rising gas prices kill the suburbs?

msn ^ | 8/15/06 | marylin lewis

[Carry_Okie]

The exercise of real power can be so big as to be virtually invisible.

[durasell]

So ole Alex Stewart was right about Garden City!

[forsnax5]

I'm in flyover country aka deep in cornland

I'm in flyover country as well, but high in the Colorado Rockies.

My specialty is COBOL - DB2.

Another green-screen dinosaur! Mine is AS/400 Cobol.

I've been working over modems since 1986. My office is in my house, so my commute is nonexistent. I'll retire in place in the next couple of years (I'm 64), and finally take out my last business phone line (I once had 5).

My wife and I moved out of SoCal in 1995, and it's been great. A couple of my kids still live there, and I really hate going back to visit. I wouldn't move back. It's a quality of life thing...

[TKDietz]

"Who can honestly call $3/gal gas expensive in todays economy? It's equivalent to the $0.22/gal of the sixties."

How do you figure that? If you say gasoline was $.022 a gallon all the way back in 1960 and then adjust that price for inflation using the Consumer Price Index, it would be $1.51 today. Gas prices peaked at an annual average of $1.35 in 1980, which adjusted for inflation would come to $3.32 today, so gasoline was actually more expensive in 1980 then it is today, but not by much. And back then people were complaining about it like crazy, buying mopeds and teeny Japanese cars. They certainly thought it was expensive back then. Personally, I think it's expensive today. If you can convince yourself it's cheap, more power to you. All I know is that it wasn't too long ago that we were paying half what we pay for gas today and we had gotten used to that. Now high gas prices are having a serious impact on folks who have to drive a lot but don't make a lot of money.

Here's a link to to a CPI inflation calculator: http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl

[stands2reason]

It will increase at least till it hits 10 billion.