Slate.com’s Robert Bryce writes that $4 for a gallon of gasoline is a bargain.
While acknowledging that higher gas prices are damaging the domestic economy and hitting the lower income folks like a 90-ton s**t hammer, Bryce lays out the case that when you look at past prices and inflated dollars gasoline costs only 20 percent more than 86 years ago.
Bryce also points out that environmentalists should be glad because paying more for gas is the only way to bring the true change needed to reduce hydrocarbons into the atmosphere. Then, he too, makes that disappointingly cliched argument that gasoline is higher elsewhere in the world than here in the U.S. of A.
“American gasoline is also dirt-cheap compared with gas in other countries. British motorists are currently paying about $8.38 per gallon for gasoline. In Norway, a major oil exporter, drivers are paying $8.73. In 2007, out of the 32 industrialized countries surveyed by the International Energy Agency, only one (Mexico) had cheaper gasoline than the United States.”
That argument has always struck me as faulty because of the driving habits in the U.S. as compared to certain other nations, not to mention that our country is so huge with places like Texas where it takes almost a day to transverse.
Bryce does make a pretty good case for gas prices being sky high but that doesn’t help Schmoes like us who have to rub two nickles together — or adjusted for inflation, one dollar coin, a quarter and three pennies — just to get by.
Down here in the refining country of Southeast Texas where I live, no one has to be told that petroleum makes the world go around. Shipping all kinds of good from here to yon normally requires some kind of petrolene and you don’t need to be an economist (nor play one on television) to know that when gasoline goes up in price likewise do goods reliant on gas or diesel to get those goods there.
Therein lies the problem. No matter what is the explanation or rationalization du jour, petroleum-driven inflation is causing a hurtin’ for certain in this country and no one seems to have the foggiest idea about measures to help ease the crunch.
So yes, gasoline should’ve been higher priced all along. I should have been a millionaire long ago and married to a loving woman who today still looks like a beauty queen. But reality is reality and someone or some ones with brains ought to start figuring out solutions other than those which will get them re-elected or elected or, as in the case of big oil execs, filthy, stinking rich.