“I just don’t drive as much,” said Herman Heaton, a 72-year-old retired lumber mill worker, leaning against a Chevy Silverado pickup that now costs him $80 to fill up. “We don’t go to Mobile as much as we used to for shopping.” Heaton said he now spends about $600 a month on gas, about 10 percent of his income and about double what he spent last year.
The above from an MSNBC story.
A retired lumber mill worker in Alabama has an income of $72,000 a year?
He’s buying, roughly, 150 gallons of gas a month? Even figuring just 10 miles a gallon, what’s a retired 72-year-old doing driving 18,000 miles a year?
He says he “just don’t drive as much,” but he also is said to be spending double on gas when gas has gone up just 33%.
There’s an interesting graphic showing New Mexico’s gas price as a percentage of income at the USA Today story.