We Still Spend A Small % Of Our Income On Gas

See Energy Fact of the Week: Real Energy Costs on the Rise for American Households? by Steven F. Hayward.

"The Los Angeles Times yesterday reported that American motorists may spend a record $491 billion for gasoline this year, reflecting the high price of gasoline. Meanwhile, the Department of Energy reported the dog-bites-man story that sales of refrigerators are down on account of the poor economy—something they might have grasped if they’d read last week’s Energy Fact of the Week. Since new refrigerators are generally more energy efficient than the fridges they replace, this implies a slowdown in the long-term trend of improving household energy efficiency.

The gasoline sales projection is an estimate from proprietary sources by an analyst with the Oil Price Information Service. And one relevant question is: what does that $491 billion figure mean in terms of its share of household income, and what has the long-term trend been over time? The Department of Energy’s data series on gasoline expenditures is surprisingly out of date; the most recent data release is from 2001. However, it is possible to see the long-term trends from data reported in the Census Bureau’s Consumer Expenditure Survey, which reports annual data from 1984 through 2009.

Figure 1 below shows that consumer expenditures for gasoline and motor oil as a percentage of average after-tax income fell steadily from about 5 percent at the beginning of the survey in 1984 to a low of 2.6 percent in 1999 (when gasoline prices dipped below $1 a gallon in many places in the United States). However, the slow rise in oil prices has pushed the figure back up to 4.4 percent in 2008—its highest level since 1985. After dipping in 2009, the 2010 and 2011 figure is likely to spike back up again when the full year’s data is reported."

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