Was going thru cleaning out all of this old paperwork I have stored all of these years....

came across some records for travel to keep in case of IRS audits...

a trip from Oregon here to the Twin Cities in Minnesota and back.. ( 1996)....

put 4150 miles on my 4 Runner for that trip...

burned up 167.5 gallons of gas there and back....

and fuel cost me $220. 34 from home to Minneapolis and back home to Oregon...

another trip towing a trailer from Minneapolis to Southern Oregon.. that one cost me $259.00 in gas, for 4150 miles...

made a lot more money then and things were so much cheaper...

some days I think I had more money to live on when I was working my way thru college than I do in today's Obama Economy...

I don't have paperwork, but i remember driving from Denver,CO to PA on 75 bucks worth of gas in my mustang gt circa 1990. Times sure have changed ,eh Seafire?

I drove across country a few times in the 1970s &'80s, and bummed around Co., Ut., Nv., NM., and Az. for a couple of years in VW vans.
I'd travel until I found a place I liked, find a job, hopefully, and enjoy the area.
I can't imagine trying to that now.

my memories from 1996 were

gas was around $1/gal
a nice house could be had for $75k
a decent truck could be bought for $15k
a decent commuter car could be had for $12k
cable was about $25/month
my stock portfolio return was about 20%/yr
my full service hmo cost about $300/mo for 5 people
my wages were only 15% less than now

something happened. not sure what.

I hear ya.. Back in the '70s - during my main motorcycle-travel days, the wife and I got by on less than $50/day including gas, food and lodging..

Man, has THAT ship sailed..

On my way back from Tampa Fl in 98' I stopped in a small town in GA to refuel. Gas was $.69 per gallon there.
I also remember back in the early 2000's they announced on the news that gas was going up to $2 per gallon and everyone was freaking out. local gas stations where limiting gas purchases so they wouldn't run out because everyone was fillng up before it hit $2.
Now we pay over $3 without a thought. The frog has been boiled...

The least expensive gas that I ever bought was 63 cents a gallon in the mid-eighties, but one needn't a long memory to notice when costs went wild.



Also very important to know is that 45% of gas prices are now tax costs and that many other travel expenses have similar tax bites.

http://costofgovernment.org/tax-bites-a99

You want to know WTF happened? All of you should read the Great Deformation by David Stockman, Reagan's budget guy who quit when Reagan busted the budget and we popped our first trillion cherry.
It's a hard, arcane wade through SEVEN HUNDRED PAGES but goes all the way back to FDR.
Bottom line is Wall Street slicked all our wealth straight off the top in speculation and money games, using cheap Fed money on the margins.
I don't agree with everything Stockman writes, but he nails one thing -- unless we get the deficit under control, America is so, so forked.

This is funny stuff... when flying was de-regulated in the late 70's flying got REALLY cheap... today flying is cheaper than it was in the 80's, adjusted for inflation.

In 1999 I bought my first diesel truck. Diesel was $1.15 here in CA.
Right now it's $3.99