http://news.msn.com/pop-culture/has-america-lost-its-love-affair-with-driving I think there are obvious answers to the questions posed by the article above. Most obvious is that operating a motor vehicle in today's economy is a highly expensive endeavor. Low cost leases have serious mileage penalties, the cost of repair for the smallest of parts has gone haywire and then of course there is the burden of fuel costs. Then... as I have experienced with a used car of my own.... you are not apt to pack up a car with 170,000 miles on it and drive a few hundred miles with your family in it. With the way incomes have become so stagnant ( damn you Obama you idiot :lol: ) especially since the Great Recession of 2007-2008 ( again.... all Obama's fault... :wink: ) I don't see the ability to pay to own and operate vehicles in America keeping up with the expense of it. Damn we need some good ole GOP econ in the Whitehouse right boys so even minimum wage earners can afford to drive!!
I guess Cindy and I just don't fit the mold. I prefer driving to flying anytime traveling in the US. My daily driver is now a 2013 Dodge Ram 5.7 Liter Hemi. My Weekend fun car, yes driving is fun, is a 2013 Challenger 6.4 Liter Hemi. Cindy has a 2012 Challenger 6.4 Liter Hemi that is used for both purposes. We have two Harley Trikes to take bike rides with the local friends with bikes. We enjoy driving performance cars. We take frequent rides with friends through the Texas hill country. Sometimes we even obey speed limits! 8) Yep!!! Thank God we do not fit the mold!
... actually, we leave on 6-Sept for two+ weeks in the hills of Tennessee. The Ram will be pulling the 24ft trailer with both Harley trikes in tow. Weather permitting, once we arrive, the truck will rest and the trikes will play.
My last new car purchase of last August was the High MPG Elantra..... because my wife needed a new ( hint: dependable ) car that got good gas mileage for her job as a home healh care RN. I am driving her old car.... a 2003 Montana that has the aforementioned 170K miles and which I am increasingly leery of driving on long trips. Heck I only have two weeks of vacation anyway in my post-recession pick yourself off the pavement job and one of those weeks is always spent with her family in Michigan and we fly up there and rent a car because it's only one week. I've been working diligently for 37 years post college and I am almost 59 years old.... with two weeks vacation so not much time to really driver anywhere anyway. Only REC can lay such a piss poor claim to leisure time off I'll bet.
The price of gas has increased 96% since Obama took office. Did I miss that point in that article? Of course there must be some way to blame Bush for gas prices. After all, he must have somehow done something to make Obama cancel many offshore drilling permits. I don't know how Bush did it but the hold up of the Keystone pipeline must be his fault. If families can't afford a car for the kids to go to High School, what real incentive is there for the kids to get a license? If you don't have a job you don't have to commute. Mr. "hope and change" is a joke when it comes to the economy. Here's an example of how jobs are lost to stupid economic policy. http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130815/OPINION01/308150006/1271/OPINION0305/Bad-policies-drive-away-job-creators
Been getting 5.6 weeks per year since January 2010. Spent so much time on airplanes from 2010 to 2012 (averaged 230,000 frequent flyer miles per year) that I would rather drive. As a teenager I liked cars. As an old fart, I like cars even more. Pisses off the kids in Mustang GT's when they get hammered by an old fart on the drag strip! :shock:
As a counter point to Dave... I get a whopping 12 days vacation per year... and yet I have two 2012 vehicles, along with a 2001 that the 16yr old drives, along with my toy pictured above. Somehow I managed to dodge the robber barons of Wall street raping and pillaging under the watchful eye of George W the Pirate King. If I can just survive Comrade Obama trying to take everything I've worked for and give it to those unfortunate souls whom I've calously walked on, I'll be alright. I still love to drive, with runs to the coast and the hill country behind me already this year. I will again be making the weekly pilgrimage to College Station to watch the Aggies in their quest for another great season... a 400 mile round trip.
One of things I have been amazed at is the total lack of interest in teens getting their drivers license. I was at the license office on the day I turned 15 for my restricted license and there again at 16. It was the "only" thing I thought of and have never looked back. My son had to be pushed and all his buds were even worse with some still without a license at 21 and there are no taxis or buses in our one horse town. With the internet and social networking they have no need to ever leave the house and visit with each other....Different era and one I cannot relate to at all...
One more thing to add to this is the data must come from only urban areas because small town living rural folks have no public transportation. Its a 52 mile round-trip to go to Walmart and every where else so you better have your license...
Gipper..... you just messin with me on your gas price comment? http://gasbuddy.com/gb_retail_price_chart.aspx The highest prices in that last 10 years was obviously under W's tenure and do you have any idea why they had fallen so dramatically by the time Obama took office? I hope you do because I sure as hell haven't forgotten why.
I'm not messing with you MCG. Look at a 10 yr. graph on oil prices. You'll see with the exception of a spike for a short period of time that gas prices in the past 2 years have been higher than they were under Bush. And recall the Lib whine during the Bush years was that Bush's oil cronies were artificially creating high prices. Since the middle of 2010 gas prices have been averaging above 3.50 higher than the below 3.00 mark during the vast majority of time during the Bush administration. And as to the spike in prices under Bush http://startthinkingright.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/bush-vs-obama-on-gasoline-prices-in-one-very-simple-picture/
Gipper click on the 10 year historical chart for gas prices in the link I provided..... which did not by the way come from "startthinkingright" That chart shows a distinctive gradual trend upward during W's presidency until the precipitous drop when the Great Recession began to implode our economy and the auto industry in particular. As the economy recovered under Obama so did gas prices on a gradual basis but over the past two years gas prices have been relatively stable with no real trend upward. This Syria B/S could have an impact though because when there is conflict in the Middle East there is opportunity galore for oil and gas companies to rape and pillage the rest of us stuck with no alternative choices...... except.... to come full circle here...... give up driving :wink:
How about.....it began to recover and is not quite where we want it but is one hell of a lot better than in the last six months of the Bush regime. I remember vividly standing at a gas pump off I696 and Hoover in Warren, Mi. in June of 2008.... pumping gas at over $4.50 per gallon while standing next to about three large SUVs who were running up $80.00 tanks and thinking to myself how something was about to break.... something had to give in a big way and then the harsh reality hit me that if the auto industry tanked..... I could be f*cked in a big way. 5 months later I was indeed f*cked...... and 6 months later on my way to Florida.
If you try to tell me this economy has recovered under Obama, the most civil thing I can tell you is **** you. Here in Huntsville, we have a ton of government contract jobs open when the economy is even mediocre. Right now, I have 9 headhunters working for me. 2 weeks ago, I discovered they were all fighting to place me in the same job with the same company.. each making their own pitch on my behalf. At first I thought it was funny until I talked to the headhunters. They didn't think it was funny. That's how shitty the job market is. There are few real jobs and they are diminishing by the day. And after all that, the company passed on me because I am 'over qualified'. I'm sorry for the rather hostile response to that statement, but it's a hostile world. People need to take that alleged 'realism' they applied to the Bush years and apply it to this *********** of an administration. Do you know.. this is true. I want you to read and burn this into your head. I was just told earlier this week that they (milspec headhunters) were hoping for an invasion of Syria/Iran (notice there is a magic spill over there) and there is a prolonged occupation... because military deployment means more immediate jobs overseas and it opens up the jobs here in the US vacated by Reserves and active duties who had been assigned stateside. Things are terrible.. absolutely terrible. The growth we've seen has been almost entirely artificially inflated. There's no buoyancy to the economy at all... The only thing that we do well is spy on ourselves and argue about what other people should do with their bodies.
I am not about to argue with a guy that needs a job..... been there done that and it is not conducive to any degree of compromising thought. It sucks plain and simple. I did say above the ecomony is not where we want it to be..... not by a long shot. But I am about the only one on this board that acknowledges just how far down the hole we were when Obama took over and how far back we have had to climb to and still have to climb. Maybe with our present system of squabbling politicrats in Washington, our polarizing "entertainment media" types and other wackadoodle zealots we won't be able to get where we have to be for a long while. I hope that's not true because even though I have a job I am pretty well stuck in stagnation it seems.
Do you forget the ******** Obama handed us when he called for the "stimulus" plan? According to him we needed it to keep unemployment from going over 8%. We pissed away almost a trillion dollars and we blew right through the unemployment mark. He's destroyed jobs in coal. He's destroyed jobs in oil. He's prevented construction jobs in the Keystone pipeline. And his "Affordable" Health Care Act is causing layoffs and movement from full to part time in many industries. Even the labor unions who've been kissing his ass do not want any part of Obama care because it will kill the 40 hour work week. What jobs has he created? Well a few temporary jobs in the green industry making solar panals until the hundreds of millions poured into companies like Solyndra ran out and went bankrupt. It ain't beacuse "we were in a deep hole" it's because he doesn't know crap about how to nurse a capitalistic economy.
That's why I removed myself from the equation. NINE contractors who normally have lots of jobs laying around all have ONE active contract. (which btw, was a PT IT Help Desk position that started at $18 an hour with the possibility for it to turn into a full time position after 90 days) In awful times, their words, they normally have maybe a dozen or 2 dozen contracts. They have ONE JOB they are fighting over tooth and nail. That doesn't seem like any sort of red flag to you?