Average miles traveled on US roads in 2019 through July looks flat compared with 2018

To put the complicated calculation in a nutshell, travel per person 16 years old and over averaged about 12,497 miles for the first seven months of 2019. The full year average for 2018 was 12,483.

So despite there being more cars on the road and population growing and a so-called economic boom, road travel has plateaued.

For another look at it, see Jill Mislinski here, whose population-adjusted road travel chart also shows that the flatlining began with 2017 and that 2005 was the peak year.

You are free to move about the country, but you are not, at least not like you were in a car. 

Maybe gasoline wouldn't cost as much if we didn't export 8% of our consumption

In 2017 our consumption of gasoline came to 3.40 billion barrels, but that year we exported 0.273 billion barrels, or 8% of that consumption, a new record. Consumption actually fell in 2017 from 2016 when consumption hit 3.41 billion barrels.

The news today says prices are climbing because of increased demand and tighter supplies. But as prices have risen in the last year, miles-traveled are down sharply year over year in January. Growth of miles-traveled had barely caught up with pre-recession levels in 2016 and 2017 and is now on the verge of recession-like conditions to start 2018.

We'll see if any of this continues, but one thing's for sure. Paying $3.00+/gallon this summer isn't what we voted for when we voted for Donald Trump.

Blaming negative GDP on the harsh winter is already forecast to get worse

The consensus estimate of the third and final report of 1Q2014 GDP, coming out on Wednesday next week, is already 60% worse than the actual second report at -1.6%. What, is the late winter suddenly become worse in the last month?

The first estimate, you will recall, came in at +0.1%, and was quickly downgraded in various places to something ranging between -0.2% and -0.4%. When the second estimate came in at a much worse -1.0%, just about everyone blamed the harsh winter for the pathetic print, including the White House, which incredibly credited GDP from spending on utilities at the same time it debited GDP because people weren't traveling (which isn't true--just examine the government's miles-traveled reports over the winter), weren't vacationing and weren't spending money on hotels and restaurants, and other such drivel.

Having it both ways, it seems, only applies south of the Canadian border, where real GDP was a negative almost $40 billion. North of it real GDP was actually positive, despite the winter, at about $4.7 billion US. A much smaller economy Canada's is, to be sure, but for that reason you'd think it more vulnerable to the harshest winter in decades whereas our much larger, more varied economy ought to be more resilient.

But up against an Obama, you would be wrong. He is secretly happy that things are going as poorly as they are, because it means that the middle class is steadily shrinking and soon will no longer be able to stand in his way, and the Democrat Party's way, of remaking America into a few haves and a lot of have-nots.

In this they are assisted by the libertarians who have successfully infiltrated the Republican Party as conservatives, who see this as their natural mission, too. Politically speaking, they are out to defeat Republicanism just as much as the Democrats are. The successful individual lone ranger is the sine qua non of their vision, after all, whose fabulous wealth is the only object of their affection. And the only thing standing in his way are people who believe in something bigger than themselves.

People who believe in something larger than themselves in America today occupy the extremes of the left and the right, and seem to be getting fewer in number as we speak, a fact noted in a recent article in The New Republic. Between them are a mass of social and economic libertines who are already the slaves of the elites, for whom neither the economic nor the moral restraint of the Protestant founders which built our country are a value. Unless we recover something of the latter the America of the past will cease to exist, if it hasn't already.

And persistently poor GDP proves it.

Hey Obama! Job Change Is A Fact!

Americans in October 2013 are driving like it's still 2005!

Maybe all that reduced carbon pollution Obama is so proud of came on the backs of workers who have millions fewer jobs to drive to: miles-traveled has been stuck at 2004/5 levels for Obama's entire presidency, reducing carbon emissions. Only a blind communist would boast of increased food supplies because he starved his people to death.

Obama thinks he has achievements, which must mean he is suffering a psychosis

From the long story in The New Yorker, here, by image-accommodating biographer David Remnick:

As Obama ticked off a list of first-term achievements—the economic rescue, the forty-four straight months of job growth, a reduction in carbon emissions, a spike in clean-energy technology—he seemed efficient but contained, running at three-quarters speed, like an athlete playing a midseason road game of modest consequence; he was performing just hard enough to leave a decent impression, get paid, and avoid injury.

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Let's see.

Starting with the economic rescue, Obama said at the time in early 2009 that he had more than enough on his plate without having to worry about the financial crisis.

So who fixed that?

Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve. While everyone was fixated on the controversy over TARP and the crony capitalist, fascist character of that bailout in the mere hundreds of billions of dollars as millions of Americans were losing their homes, behind the scenes the Fed was providing multiple trillions of dollars of short-term loans to just about any bank or business in the world which was in trouble, at rock-bottom low interest rates which homeowners could only dream about, right into 2010. They all got fixed while 5.6 million Americans went on to lose their homes through 2013.

And what did Obama do in response to that?

Disgracefully fire Bernanke in public by saying he'd overstayed his time at the Fed, but that came only long after everything looked like it was truly stabilized. And I do mean "looked". The fact of the matter is extraordinary measures remain in place at the Fed because the banks' condition is still not healthy enough to do without them. When those end, the crisis will be truly over, not before. The rescue is still underway, with no end in sight.

Then there's the 44 months of job growth claim. Well, the truth is we are in the 72nd month of the jobs recession as we speak today, the longest jobs recession in the history of the post-war by a long shot. Bush's had been the longest previously, at 47 months. And it is estimated that the current jobs recession will not be over for another 6 months, which means we'll finally have matched the number of payroll jobs which existed at the time the recession began, but only after about 6.5 years have gone by.

But that says nothing about a return to normalcy. Include the shortfall which exists in the numbers because of net population growth over the period and the country will still be in a serious jobs deficit once the jobs recession is over, and for a long time to come without some major driver for jobs appearing on the scene.

Finally, I'm not sure how anyone measures a reduction in carbon emissions when China keeps them billowing into the air at a record rate, burning coal and oil in huge quantities. Obama can point to the closing down of coal power plants in this country if he wants, but all that does is make American electricity more expensive as China's waves of pollution waft ever eastward over the Pacific, polluting our air, water and farmland.

But if anyone's contributing to the reduction in carbon emissions in this country, it's the American worker who isn't working. Travel on the road in this country has been stuck at levels first reached between 2004 and 2005 for five long years because so many people no longer have a job to which to commute. Every month that goes by shows the same statistical result: no progress in miles traveled back to the levels of the 2007 peak. It's an odd thing to be taking credit for.

If it is clear from these facts that Obama is delusional and lives in a separate reality, it is also clear from Remnick's story that Obama has to work hard at crafting it, even about what is probably at the heart of his mental problems in the first place: 

When I asked Obama about another area of shifting public opinion—the legalization of marijuana—he seemed even less eager to evolve with any dispatch and get in front of the issue. “As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life. I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.”

Is it less dangerous? I asked.

Obama leaned back and let a moment go by. That’s one of his moves. When he is interviewed, particularly for print, he has the habit of slowing himself down, and the result is a spool of cautious lucidity. He speaks in paragraphs and with moments of revision. Sometimes he will stop in the middle of a sentence and say, “Scratch that,” or, “I think the grammar was all screwed up in that sentence, so let me start again.”

Why does the smartest president ever have to edit everything, all the time, until it makes sense to him?

Who do you call to have the president committed?

Got Gas? You Should.

The cheapest Grand Rapids gasoline price today is $3.64/gallon, while the average price is $3.75/gallon. The cheapest price is up 6.7% from just a week ago when gasoline was already expensive at $3.41/gallon. Truly affordable gasoline would be closer to $2.60/gallon, according to Tim McMahon at inflationdata.com.

After hearing reports on the radio this week that Michigan ranks 10th in number of miles traveled by car in the country, today Woodradio.com reports, more to the point, that travel miles are actually down in Michigan, all the way to 2005 levels, something I and some others have been reporting for over a year about the country in general. Travel miles actually have been stuck at levels first achieved 8-9 years ago as a consequence of the economic depression we entered in 2007, when travel miles reached their peak.

We haven't been the same since.

Depression In Real Retail Sales Finally Ends, Beats Old 2006 High

The old high in Dec. 2006 was $180.016 billion. The depression low was $155.927 billion in March 2009, a decline of 13.4% in inflation adjusted retail sales. The new real gain in monthly retail sales, however, is barely $350 million, with an "m".

It remains to be seen if the new higher level of real retail sales can be sustained with increased payroll taxes factored in, presumably taking money out of retail circulation. Velocity of M2 and MZM were already at historic lows in Q4 2012 in the post-war period at the temporary lower payroll tax rate.

Gasoline prices were last consistently below $3.00 a gallon in 2010 and since then have averaged about $3.50 a gallon. At roughly 10% of total retail, sudden spikes in gasoline prices can produce expenditure on gasoline which represents a phantom increase to sales, and also mask the fact that miles-traveled remain in depression, a more concrete, so to speak, decline in velocity caused chiefly by enduring low employment by historical measures.

Update, 4-15-13: While the above graph shows real retail, that is, retail level adjusted for inflation, I have found a better representation of reality by Doug Short, reproduced and referenced here, which also adjusts for population growth and removes gasoline because it is really a form of taxation which obscures the underlying level of true retail activity. Bottom line: real retail is actually still about 8% off the 2005 high measured the same way.