[fabsroman]

Rocky understands my post completely.

My point is that everybody has made choices in life and everybody wants to complain about how bad they have it.

Me, I made the choice to put myself through law school and was poor as could be until I was 28. My parents paid for undergrad, but that was only if I agreed to commute from their house to college. Undergrad cost them $8,000 total. I worked for 2 years out of undergrad to try and save enough to go to law school. Law school cost me around $30,000. During that entire time, I barely spent any money on anything and drove a 1980 Ford Fairmont even though I had the Mustang because I CHOSE to keep the Mustang like new. The Fairmont up and died on me when I graduated law school and I had to buy the Taurus, with hardly enough money for a down payment, because I just got out of school. Good thing is that I got out of school debt free, with the exception of the 0% interest loan on the Taurus.

Throughout law school, I CHOSE to live with my parents, which wasn't always fun, but they were gracious enough to allow me to live there for a very modest rent amount. I CHOSE this so I could graduate without any loans. The first year in law school I worked as a video store clerk part time making a little over $5 an hour. My second and third years of law school I worked as a law clerk making $12 an hour. Almost all of that money went toward paying for law school. So I wasn't rich. When I graduated law school, I was offered a job for $35,000 a year and $40,000 a year once I got sworn in. It has been 7 years since then and I have been making pretty good money over the last 5 with my practice starting to get really busy right now.

So, lets just make one thing clear here, things haven't been all roses for me either.

I would have loved to be married with kids by the time I was 25 so that I wouldn't be an old man when they grow up, but I chose differently so I could make a better future for me and subsequently my family.

We all make decisions in life, but we shouldn't expect the federal government to bail us out of everything.

DaMadman,

You made the decision to live far from work so that you could afford a decent house in a decent neighborhood. You bought your house 8 years ago when they were reasonable. I could be on here complaining to no end about how ridiculous house prices are because I bought my first house last year. 7 years ago, this place cost $156,000 and I could have made that money clear in 4 or 5 years to pay the entire thing off. Now, the townhouse I bought cost $333,000 and in the one year I have been here, it has gone to $425,000. You can imagine what the houses around here are, they are astronomical. What the wife and I have been looking at is in the $1,000,000 range. The cheapest homes around here are $700,000 unless you want to live in a house from World War II in the worst part of the city.

Here is an example of wanting your cake and wanting to eat it too. You want to be safe while driving so you want to drive a big car. Yet, you don't want to pay the additional price for gas. That leads me to another point from my earlier post. Everybody wants things, but we cannot have it all. You cannot have a big, rather safe SUV, and a cheap gas bill when you live a million miles from work.

I was in Arizona for my honeymoon and saw land for sale for $100 an acre. With just $10,000 I could have a 100 acres to build a house on and live in style. Problem is, I wouldn't have any clients. Your complaining about the price of gas and your commute to work is akin to me moving to Arizona in the middle of nowhere and then complaining about not having any clients and having to drive 2 hours to the supermarket at these gas prices. Hence, I quickly decided that buying a place out there would not be the right choice.

Now, I also know where you live and I know there are neighborhoods closer to DC than where you live and they aren't that bad. Do you work near a metro stop? If so, you can move right by me, drive 5 miles to the metro and take the metro into work for $5 a day and Montgomery County schools are some of the best in the nation.

See, there are always alternatives to get around things other than just complaining about them.

I used to hate taking the metro into DC, and I used to complain about the parking conditions in DC, the cost of parking in DC, and the traffic to get into DC. Decided that the negatives of the metro weren't as bad as the negatives about driving into DC, so the metro it is when I go to DC.

I have been watching 20/20 tonight and this post kind of reminds me about what I saw on there regarding the hurricane. Everybody is complaining about the situation and blaming the federal government for not preventing it or bailing them out from it quick enough. There is only so much the federal government can do without raising taxes, but nobody wants taxes raised either because WE ALL WANT OUR CAKE AND WE WANT TO EAT IT TOO. It would be kind of like California complaining about a catastrophic earthquake. Hello, you knew what it was when you moved there. New Orleans was protected by decades old levies, the failure of which would cause a flood in the city. The people knew that while they were living there, but now it is the governments fault that all this happened. People knew that they would consume a lot of gas by living far away from work and by buying SUV's, but now it is the government's fault that the price of gas went up and they are suffering. We all want to blame somebody else for our bad times.

Quite simply, I was raised by some very conservative parents straight from Italy after World War II. My uncle and aunt on my father's side remember the bombers dropping bombs in neighboring cities. My parents came over here with pretty much nothing. They worked hard, hardly ever complained about anything, and have done pretty well for themselves. When the "oil crisis" of the 70's hit, my dad stopped driving a pontiac sled and bought a very small FIAT. He also bought a lot of gas cans and filled them up from the Pontiac when he could get that car filled up. Thing is, he isn't complaining about the gas prices right now. He just went out before the prices went up and he filled up all of his gas cans. He doesn't drive his Crown Victoria or his F-150 around anymore, but drives his Chevy (gag) Cavalier instead.

I guess I am just tired of people making choices in life and then complaining about them later on when things change. Like I said, I could be on here complaining day and night about the housing situation in my area, and think I even did a couple of times in the past, but it is what it is, so I just have to increase my legal rate or the number of hours I work/bill. LOL

In the end, we can all complain night and day about the gas prices. It won't change anything, but if it makes you guys feel better, be my guest.

I seriously doubt that the federal government could or should set the price of gas. I also agree with the tax on gas because it is used to create and maintain the roads that people use to burn the gas on. Why should somebody who barely drives or never drives have to take up the cost of building roads?

One last thing, nobody NEEDS to buy gas. We CHOOSE and are FORCED to buy gas as a result of the previous decisions we make in life. If you truly couldn't afford gas, you would figure something out, but the current gas price is merely affecting your life style so you are complaining about it.

Guess what, the current gas price and housing market are affecting my lifestyle too, alond with a million other things, but I'll continue to make decisions in the future on how to deal with all these issues.