Excellent Points...

No, this blog is not going to become Erik's Perpetual Commentary on TSO, but you should read what he has to say here.

He is spot on. The high gas prices (we are at about $3.40 a gallon in California) cost us an extra fifty bucks a month. A pain in the kiester, but not the end of the world, and that, combined with the dollar toll increase, has made me more inclined to use BART when going to the City (we get public transit fare with pre-tax dollars).

Part of this is that, due to our Explorer's crappy mileage, a trip to the City costs about $12, not counting parking or coffee or food or doing anything that costs money. So, four trips a month saves me $48, and that is four decent bottles of wine. I like spending money on wine more than on transportation.

Of course we don't really commute by car, and we have not gone on a lot of road trips. Even so, this is hardly the stuff of "major financial crisis." You can budget and plan for these things. And if you can't, well, that says more about you than it does about the price of gas.

PS. Of course when the price of gas jumped a few years ago, I used that as part of my justification to raise my writing fees, but you have to make your fee stay in line with your costs of doing business.