With the news today that gas prices have hit $6 per gallon in some areas of Florida – and a brief drive around the Los Angeles area will show you gas prices nearing the $5 range regularly – Americans may need to begin considering what they will do if the economy takes another nose dive.

This isn’t alarmism. Oil price rises of this magnitude have repeatedly done severe damage to the American economy, most recently during the summer of 2008. Economist James Hamilton of the University of California, San Diego, elucidates:

Big oil price increases that were associated with events such as the 1973-74 embargo by the Organisation of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, the Iranian Revolution in 1978, the Iran-Iraq War in 1980, and the First Persian Gulf War in 1990 were each followed by a global economic recession. The price of oil doubled between June 2007 and June 2008, a bigger price increase than in any of those four earlier episodes.

Hamilton’s economic models suggest that we could have predicted the GDP for 2008 by looking at oil prices almost exclusively. His statistical model was so strong that he actually admitted he didn’t believe it himself.

The logic here is simple. When oil prices rise, Americans don’t have enough money left over to pay for other items. Raises in oil prices cause inflation in food prices and secondary industries. That, in turn, sucks even more disposable income out of the economy. Eventually, people don’t have the money to buy new houses or pay their mortgages – especially people who took out mortgages too large and were living paycheck to paycheck. Boom.

On January 5, 2007, the price of a barrel of light, sweet crude oil was $56.31. By July 4, 2008, it had almost tripled to $145.29. No wonder people were hurting.

After the economic catastrophe of September 2008, oil prices dropped all the way back down again to $36.51 in January 2009. They’re now the highest they’ve been since April 2011, at $103.24 – almost three times as high. We may be approaching another tipping point.

From The Chicago Tribune:

At least eight Chicago labor leaders who are eligible for inflated city pensions also stand to receive union pensions covering the same work period, thanks to a charitable interpretation of state law by officials representing two city pension funds, a Tribune/WGN-TV investigation has found.

By double and even triple dipping on pensions, these union officials stand to reap millions more in retirement while thousands of rank-and-file union members face hard times and city pension funds stagger toward insolvency.

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Team Obama is out and about mourning a “double-dip recession,” while Fed head Ben Bernanke is warning of a faltering economy. I have described the current economic environment as the front end of a recession.

But Obama’s populist, class-warfare attack on millionaires and billionaires, his new war on bank profits, his linking arms with the protesters occupying Wall Street, and his big-government stimulus plan will surely not solve this crisis.

The September jobs report underscores the economic alarm. The unemployment rate stayed at 9.1 percent. But the rate of marginally unemployed (U6) jumped from 16.2 percent to 16.5 percent. Nonfarm payrolls rose by 103,000 while private payrolls gained by 137,000, small-enough increases to dodge a recession bullet right now. But nearly half those job gains came from the return of 45,000 striking Verizon workers.

And while the small-business household survey showed an encouraging jump of 398,000, it turns out that an even larger 444,000 are only working part-time. So household employment — excluding the part timers — actually fell by 46,000. That’s a discouraging sign. At the same time, worker earnings are rising less than the inflation rate. That’s a consumer drag on the economy.

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Obama finally got something right. Can you believe it? In a recent interview, Obama said he is confident we will not enter a double dip recession. Brilliant Sherlock. No, we are not entering a double dip. That is because we never left the first dip. Only Obama could get something so right, because he is so wrong.

While Obama, Fed Chief Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Geithner, and various other Obama economists, lackeys and socialist cabal members drone on about double dip, or not to double dip, common folks on Main Street understand that there has never been a recovery.

The continuing Great Recession started on Bush’s watch in 2007 and has never ended. Like Herbert Hoover, another Republican President who panicked, and failing Capitalism 101, abandoned fiscal conservative principles, George W. Bush turned to big government to “save us.” And as usual, the more government tries to save us, the worse it gets. So Bush channeled Hoover, starting the bailouts, stimulus, and insane levels of spending and government intervention.

Then, just when you thought it could not get any worse, along came Obama with his “Axis of Evil” game plan. What is the “Axis of Evil,” you ask? It is the principles to which Obama’s life is dedicated: Taxation, Regulation, Government Strangulation, Unionization and Litigation.

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From James Pethokoukis in Reuters:

And it may be about to get a whole lot worse for the Obama 2012 campaign. The White House’s worst-case scenario for the economy on Election Day next year has become Wall Street’s baseline scenario. After looking at a string of weak economic reports and Europe’s growing fear of debt meltdown and contagion, JPMorgan – led by Obama pal Jamie Dimon – has just come out with a politically poisonous forecast.

The megabank now thinks the economy won’t grow much faster over the next 12 months than it did during the first half of this year — and that’s assuming Europe doesn’t go all pear shaped. It sees GDP growth at just 1.5 percent this year, 1.3 percent next year with unemployment at … 9.5 percent heading into the final days of the election season. “The risks of recession are clearly elevated,” the bank said. Here’s its reasoning:

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Political prognosticator Charlie Cook’s latest column in National Journal:

Labor Day is almost here and Democrats are still waiting for the cavalry to arrive. An exhaustive scan of the horizon reveals no rescuers and none of the things Democrats badly need to save them from tough midterm election losses on Nov. 2.

There are few signs of any meaningful recovery, and indeed there is more talk of a double-dip recession, plunging the country back into economic trouble between now and the end of the year. Unemployment seems stuck at 9.5 percent, reinforcing the view that last year would have been better spent focusing on the economy than on health care reform.

Democrats also needed a public re-evaluation of the new health care reform law. They needed the public to decide that it wasn’t so bad, that it was a good idea after all. That hasn’t happened, as pointed out by the Kaiser Family Foundation’s health care monthly tracking poll released this week. Favorable attitudes toward the new law dropped from 50 percent last month to 43 percent this month, and unfavorable views climbed from 35 percent to 45 percent. Twenty-nine percent of Americans believe that they and their families will be better off under the new law, while 30 percent say they will be worse off and 36 percent say it will not make much difference.

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