For your future household budgeting: a graph (courtesy of Randall Parker at ParaPundit).
If you added in a trend line for gas and home heating, it would be even more depressing …
… though probably not as depressing as watching Chuck Schumer on TV last night telling us we should lean on the Saudis (how?) to pump more oil, so the price of gas will come down. I understand why someone living in a 10,000-sq-ft McMansion and driving two behemoth SUVs would want the price of gas to come down, but why should the rest of us? The age of cheap oil is over. The sooner we start adjusting, the better. One-off stunts to lower the price of gas won’t help anything … except, I suppose, the re-election prospects of halfwit senators.