Two ways to think about gas prices
By DEBORAH STONE
GUEST COLUMNIST

Late in the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan advised voters how to think about their choice for president: “Ask yourself these questions: Are you better off today than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to buy things in the store than it was four years ago?”

If that was the price-of-hamburger theory of campaigning, we might call 2008 the price-of-gas election. But I hope the candidates will ask voters to think a little differently this time around – to think not only of ourselves, but of our neighbors.

Helping others, it turns out, is as strong a human motive as self-interest, and as crucial to our well-being as the drive to get ahead. Helping the needy and the suffering is also the closest thing we have to a universal moral principle and a shared religious value. Humans are not made of unadulterated self-interest. We live for ourselves, but we are altruists, too. We are born needing help, we die needing help, and we spend our lives giving and getting help.

Consider what the price of gas means to two women profiled recently in The New York Times. Katie Clark, a 26-year-old single mother of two, earns $250 a week as a home care aide, less the cost of gas that she must cover herself. She helps one elderly couple twice a day, seven days a week.

Without her they’d be in nursing homes – but it now costs her $100 a week in gas money to help them. If she were purely self-interested, she’d either look for more remunerative work or refuse to serve those clients who live 25 miles away from her. But Clark has done neither. She borrows money so she can keep helping them because, as she said, “They’re just like family to me.”

Or think about Sandra Prediger, a 70-year-old woman who drives her more senior friends to doctors and stores, and has been paying for the gas herself until recently, when she reluctantly had to ask her friends to share the costs. When her Social Security check runs out near the end of the month, the people at the local gas station allow her to postdate her check. They know why she needs gas. It seems they want to help her help others.

In dire times like these, there are two responses: Fend for yourself or help your neighbors. People are always better off when they look out for one another. Political leaders can nudge us one direction or the other by the way they talk to us.

Candidates might ask us to ask ourselves, “Are you and your neighbors better off today than you were four years ago? Can you care for the people you love as you’d like to? Is your community a better or worse place to live?”

I hope they will begin with something like, “Tell me what kind of help you need from government to be able to care for your family and help your neighbors.”

Deborah Stone is a senior fellow at the policy center Demos and research professor of government at Dartmouth College. Her book The Samaritan’s Dilemma: Should Government Help Your Neighbor? was published this month by Nation Books.

I live in Evart, in one of the poorest counties in the northern area of Michigan. You have to travel long distances to get from one house to another.

I did home health aide work for 25 years, but I stopped last year. My consumers that I had passed away or they were too far to drive to. It was a tough decision, but I can’t care for someone that lives farther away because that is dollars out of my pocket. We’re not paid for mileage.

Where I live, I would have to drive 40 or 50 miles to get to where a client would be, and it’s slow driving. Some clients live way back on dirt roads. Then, when I got there, I’d only have a couple of hours of work. I get paid $7.15 an hour, and in slow driving like that, my car gets 10 or 12 miles a gallon, even though I don’t have a big car. Gas is up to about $4 a gallon, so I’d be spending more on gas than I’d be making.

When I do training, I just drive to one place and then home, and I get paid mileage. If the state would pay the mileage for home health aides, I think that would make a big difference.

I enjoy taking care of the elderly, because I think they deserve to stay at home. They have their houses established, if they haven’t lost them, or even their apartment. I think they have the right to stay home. Some of the elders get Meals on Wheels and it’s their only meal, but the volunteers who bring them don’t get any gas money. If they stop being able to deliver the meals, then what will they eat?

The consumers are very important, and they’re the ones who will pay the price for the high gas prices. If no one can afford to get to their homes people will say, “Well, you can’t take care of yourself, so you’re going into a nursing home.”