"We have sort of become a nation of whiners, you just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline." Former senator Phil Gramm said the above words not too long ago, referring the general sense of gloom (dare we say "malaise"?) concerning the U.S. economy. He went on to say we were only in a "mental recession," not a real one. It cost him his place in John McCain's campaign, and probably doomed his chances at a position in a McCain White House.

Was he wrong in his assessment? Not really. Andrew Ferguson noted in a recent Weekly Standard, Gramm was in the right: "A recession is two consecutive quarters of economic contraction, and the economy didn't contract last quarter." So Gramm was just telling the truth, at least about the recession part. But are we "a nation of whiners"? Well, sort of. For a nation so successful, with such a high standard of living, Americans do tend to complain an awful lot.

Let's take the supposedly catastrophically high gasoline costs that are forcing people to curb their driving, buy reasonably sized cars, and perhaps even walk places. Prices are apparently so bad, some religious folks are even holding prayer vigils at gas stations, praying for relief at the pump, like Dark Ages peasants prayed for relief from the Plague. (No self-flagellation has been reported... yet.) True, prices per gallon are higher than they used to be, but we often forget just how cheap gas is in the U.S. We're paying about $4 per liter right now on average nationwide, and obviously more here in Hawaii. How about the rest of the world? The rest of the English-speaking world--the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand--are paying (in U.S. dollars) about $8.60, $5, $5.75, and $6.13, respectively. Our Pacific neighbors, Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, are paying $6, $7.30, and $4.60. Some continental Europeans are paying even more, just look at Germany ($9) or Belgium ($9.40). Norwegians pay a whopping $10.30, yet somehow Norway still manages to top the United Nations ranking of most livable countries. And if mass poverty, rampant crime, and the memory of a bloody civil war aren't enough to dissuade you from moving to Sierra Leone, perhaps paying over $18 for a liter of gas will.

Granted, some nations pay less at the pump. Most of these countries are in the Middle East, though if you relocated to Hugo Chavez's socialist utopia of Venezuela, you would only be paying 11 cents or so for gas. Of course, living under the Chavez regime, you would have plenty of other things to worry about besides fuel costs. While we are paying more for gas, at least we aren't having to wait in line at the gas station as we did during the fuel crisis of the '70s. Back then, waiting hours to fuel up wasn't uncommon, and stations often limited the amount of gas sold to a customer. Economist Donald J. Boudreaux of George Mason University examined just how pricey it could be to buy gas in the Carter Years. The results are intriguing:

"The average price of a gallon of gasoline in 1979 was (in 1979 dollars) 90 cents. So if a worker in 1979, earning that year's average hourly wage of $6.19, spent one hour waiting in line to buy five gallons of gasoline - a standard maximum amount that filling stations would sell to customers during periods of shortage - he would have spent, waiting in queues, $1.24 worth of his time for every gallon he bought. The total cost per gallon to him would have been $2.14 ($0.90 in cash expense plus $1.24 in time expense). $2.14 in 1979 was worth about $6.36 of today's dollars -- a cost per gallon much higher than the roughly $4 that we Americans now pay (without having to queue up for the privilege of filling our tanks)." Boudreaux goes on to mention that a one hour wait was rather conservative estimate, and notes he and his father once waited 12 hours to buy five gallons of gasoline.

Another economist, Mark J. Perry of the University of Michigan, looked at gas prices from a slightly different angle. He compared the retail prices of gasoline over the years to average per-capita amounts of disposable income. His conclusions may surprise you:

"The retail price of gas was only about 20 cents a gallon from 1929 to 1946, but annual per-capita disposable income in the 1930s was only about about $400-500 (about $6,000 in today's dollars), so that a 1,000 gallons of gas cost as much as almost 49 percent of per-capita disposable income in 1933, and averaged more than 38 percent from 1929-1939.... To reach those levels today, gas would have to sell for between $14 and $17 per gallon!"

Similar conclusions were reached by Investor's Business Daily. By looking at mean disposable incomes, they figured "if we adjust gasoline prices in 1949 — 27 cents a gallon — for inflation, it works out to $1.90 per gallon in today's terms. And if we adjust for changes in mean disposable income, we find that gasoline prices would have to be $6.68 per gallon before they took the same bite out of our wallets."

So while gasoline prices are indeed higher in the U.S. than they have been in recent memory, we are still paying less at the pump than most other industrialized nations, and, depending on how you look at it, we're paying less than we did a generation or two ago. The citizens of all those countries with high fuel prices seem to be doing alright, and have managed to avoid a gas-related apocalypse. Americans in the past managed to do fine, too. Can't we?

-GIR-

Brandon Bosworth is a Policy Analyst with GRIH and a freelance writer living in Hawaii. Look for Part 2 of 'Nation Of Whiners' in an upcoming edition of GIR.