Oh what a circus, oh what a show, America has gone to town, Over the death of a mineral called cheap gasoline. We’ve all gone crazy, Mourning all day and mourning all night, Falling over ourselves to get all of the misery right. … WITH great apologies for the above to the greatest librettists and musical show composers of all time, the guys who brought us “Evita,” let us sit down upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of a beloved hydrocarbon. Now, what I am about to say may shock you. As of this spring in our country, before the immense climb in gasoline prices, the purchase of gasoline and oil amounted to barely 2 percent of national income. Barely 2 percent. Suppose the prices have risen by one-fourth since then. Now gasoline and oil would be roughly 2.5 percent of the total. Or look at it another way. As of this spring, gasoline and oil and heating oil together amounted to about 2.5 percent of total personal consumption expenditures in this great country. Considering the recent price increases, these goods might account for slightly more than 3 percent of such expenditures now. (All of these calculations come from numbers in the March report to Congress from the Council of Economic Advisers.) We are talking about several hundred billion dollars here. I could have a lot of fun with that money, rescuing lost dogs and cats, but it’s not enough to shake the foundations of the nation, at least not a nation of this size. Certainly, it’s not enough to affect even vaguely the incomes of upper-class or upper-middle-income people. The average driver travels about 12,000 miles a year, and if he or she gets 15 miles per gallon (not good mileage at all), the annual gasoline bill would have been about $3,200 a month ago and maybe $3,600 now (if the vehicle uses premium). For people who make a half-million dollars a year, that’s pennies. The increase from a year or two ago also means little to them. The problem comes in another, staggering set of government numbers. (Economists argue about the validity of using these numbers over long periods, but they capture the sorrow of the situation.) Get this, friends: from 1947 to about 1973 — from the days from the great Harry S. Truman to the great Richard M. Nixon — real hourly pay for nongovernment workers rose by about 40 percent. The peak year was the one before R.N. left for San Clemente in 1974. Since then, real wages both hourly and weekly for all nongovernment workers, on average, have fallen by about 5 percent, very roughly. There are all kinds of reasons for this, ranging from the larger size and different composition of the labor force to the devastating foreign competition in manufacturing, which tends to set a limit on other wages as well. But the trend is dismal. The average private worker now earns very roughly $600 a week, not counting fringe benefits. For this worker, gasoline might well account for close to one-tenth of his or her earnings. If the price of gas goes up 25 percent, the effect is serious. To put it mildly, people making $600 a week do not have a lot of leeway on spending. As I see it, the problem is not the price of oil generally. (I think that the price will decline somewhat before long, but the long-term trend is very much up.) The problem is the stagnation of wages. Please bear in mind that the numbers I gave are averages. Skilled workers make much more. Lawyers, doctors, investment bankers, accountants, dentists — they all make more. ( I just paid two dentists a total of more than $10,000 — I am not kidding — to have one poor old tooth get a root canal and a crown, and I’m not finished with that miserable tooth yet. I paid for 90 percent of it out of my own pocket. I do earn more than the ordinary citizen, but nothing by Wall Street standards.) But, obviously, a heck of a lot of workers make less. Imagine what it means to minimum-wage workers for gasoline to surge past $4 a gallon. What is to be done? The federal government can do little to make the price of oil fall in the short run, except, perhaps, for one basic thing: balance the budget. The world price of oil is denominated in dollars. The dollar is weak for many reasons, but a big one is the immense budget deficits run by our government. If President Bush and Senators John McCain and Barack Obama were to stand together in front of a camera and solemnly swear that they would balance the budget in four years, even if it required tax increases on people earning millions, the dollar would rise against the euro, and oil would fall in dollars. But that will not happen. So the only thing for workers to do is to drive less, buy fuel-efficient cars and trucks and, above all, whip their children into a frenzy to get more education. Not many doctors and lawyers are worried about the high price of gasoline. Not many people at hedge funds are worried about filling the tanks of their Bentleys. WE need more human capital in our labor force and more efficiency in fuel use. These will have to reverse the trend in real wages and the real cost of gasoline. Balancing the budget would be good, too, but I won’t hold my breath. Meanwhile, it’s all a bit discouraging — especially the trend for wages. But we will get through it, just as we get through everything else, one adaptive, smart American at a time.

Kathryn Carlson reported from Kennedy Airport in New York and Nick Bunkley from Detroit.