Fool Resistant

Minimum wage in 1998	$5.15
Gasoline cost in 1998	$1.24
Minutes:seconds worked per gallon gas in 1998	14:27
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Minimum wage in 2008	$5.85
Gasoline cost in 2008	$4.00
Minutes:seconds worked per gallon gas in 2008	41:02

Even though I make more than minimum wage, that kid working at McD's back in 1998 still has me beat on purchasing power*, as far as gasoline goes.

Thoughts? Anyone interested in the "bread and circuses" model that compares the cost of food and movie tickets? Or what would be the appropriate circus equivalent?

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*If you would like to figure out your own costs, but are math-impaired, here's what I did:

Question: How long must you work at a certain wage to earn a gallon of gas at a certain cost?

This is only tricky because it involves minutes and seconds, which aren't regular decimal fractions of an hour.

Example:
Cost of gas divided by wages
1.24 / 5.15
answer: 0.24077...

x 60 to get minutes
answer: 14.44660...
14 is the minutes here (and the seconds are still after the decimal); write down 14 somewhere and subtract it.

answer: 0.44660 (same as above without the 14)
x 60 to get seconds
answer: 26.79611
26, rounded up to 27, is the seconds.

Answer: 14 minutes, 27 seconds at 5.15 an hour equals one gallon of gas at 1.24 a gallon.