How to Afford Gasoline in 2012

[HeyBub]

In 1945, a gallon of gas cost twenty cents, two dimes.

Those same two 1945 dimes would buy a gallon of gas today - with some change left over.

[Han]

"HeyBub" wrote in news:h86dnVQCh6w2mujSnZ2dnUVZ [e-mail]:

Comparing the cost of metals and the cost of gasoline is just not right.

Gold was ~$32/oz then and now is >$1600/oz. Unfortunately, my old gold tooth crown that popped off didn't pay for the tooth repair, nor for much gas.

The only comparison that really counts is how much money you'd earn in equivalent jobs/positions then and now. AFAIK, the price of gasoline is comparatively on the low side.

[Robert Green]

The CT post has a good perspective.

It's not an article, it's a letter to the editor. Any kook can write one. Like that one did. Or perhaps you support this other "CT good perspective."

Besides, the federal lands hold oil that belong to every US citizen. Obama won the general election therefore he gets to decide issues like this. That's what happens in a democracy. Clearly you don't like how democracies work so why not find a country more to your liking? You seem to have quickly (conveniently?)forgotten about Big Oil stepping on its Big D!ck and polluting the coasts of a number of states.

Big Oil lied when it said it had "blow out" preventers that actually worked. Now they're paying for lying by the Feds not believing them without investigating thoroughly. As they should. Or are you against people taking responsibility for their own actions? I don't want to have to swim in Big Oil's black lies. They did the crime, now they do the time.

Besides, having oil reserves is like having money in the bank. I find it odd to hear Republicans demand we cut back on spending "for future generations" but seem happy to leave our descendants bereft of oil. Germany and Japan lost WWII in large part because they ran out of oil. That's an important lesson, but one some people choose to ignore. If another WW breaks out, you can forget about transoceanic oil shipments. We would go to war mostly with the oil we've got in the ground and in storage. Would you sell out the future security of America to save 25 cents a gallon on gas? Not me.

-- Bobby G.

[Kurt Ullman]

Looks like Obama is getting ready to do exactly that if he and the Euros really decide to open up the spigots on the Strategic Oil Reserve.

[Stormin Mormon]

After years of observing how he "runs the country", I've concluded. The foreign born America hating marxist doesn't have the nation's best interest at heart.

Christopher A. Young Learn more about Jesus

.

[Robert Green]

You know he's got no choice. How else can he respond to the "Blame Obama for Voracious Worldwide Competition and an Enormous Growth in Oil Speculation" game? That's the latest "the sky is falling" ploy that is being run by a certain party with eyes on the Whitehouse. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve can be replenished once the manufactured hysteria has died down, the Iran/Syria crisis cooled off and the election is over. The SPR has been put into play many, many times in the past.

It's not necessarily statistically valid to compare the 727 million barrels in the SPR to the estimate 20+ billion barrels of proven reserves. They are very different forms of liquidity. (-: The SPR has been tapped quite a few times since it was started. But it's much harder to jam that oil back into the ground than it is to replenish the SPR, often in lieu of royalty payments. I don't see this as a danger, just a forced temporary setback. I do see a danger in "drill, baby, drill." I see hypocrisy in claims we can't saddle our kids with a huge deficit (which we could literally print our way out of) while the question about leaving them short of oil (which no printing press can remedy) goes largely unnoticed.

From what I've heard about the SPR, a good-look see is very much in order from time to time. What better way to judge its capabilities than a sell-off? Some people believe it's filled with a substantial amount of "junk oil." That's oil that has been seriously contaminated in some way and sold into the reserve where discovery of the fraud could take years and prosecution forever. I suspect - no, fear - the SPR has been as well-inspected as the blowout preventers on BP's deepsea rig were. We know how that ended. You can't trust government OR big business to self-regulate in situations like this.

As you're well aware, oil prices fluctuate based on rumors, predictions, world events, etc. Merely threatening to tap the reserves seems to have had an effect on speculators who could get badly trashed by such a move. Besides, according to the laws that created the Reserve the President can open them if he deems

(A) an emergency situation exists and there is a significant reduction in supply which is of significant scope and duration; (B) a severe increase in the price of petroleum products has resulted from such emergency situation; and

(C) such price increase is likely to cause a major adverse impact on the national economy.

The current situation in Iran and Syria seem to qualify for a release.

With the Republicans trying to make gas prices into yet another "Look at what Obama did NOW" issue, I don't see he has a lot of choice. If the release is effective, it means yet another attack vector for November gets closed off. This falls under the computer science saying: "A backup isn't really a backup until you've proved you can restore it."

You can examine the list of releases and see that this isn't the first release. Historically, the price of gas will be reduced, but only temporarily. Probably just enough to guarantee that gas prices are not the issue Mitt and Rick hope they're going to be in November 2012.

Have you been following some of the latest economic studies? They're beginning to put the lie to the Laffer curve and suggest that the Bush tax cuts are what put us in the current economic crisis. Some even say that raising the tax rates for the very wealthy to pre-cut levels *and* closing a number of loopholes would reduce the deficit substantially.

[Robert Green]

"Stormin Mormon" wrote another almost fact-free post

Stormie, where did you go to school? You're entitled to a refund. There are plenty of people without high school degrees in AHR that can (and do) write rings around you. Why should anyone consider your mostly fact-free political observations would be any more accurate than your command of written English?

First line: Grammar - Sentence fragment, improper punctuation. "I've concluded" should NOT be followed by a period. Your fragment makes no sense as it stands. The correct form is "After X, I concluded Y." Your "Y" is missing from the first sentence fragment. (1)

First line: Grammar - The comma should be inside the quotes but more importantly, the use of quotes suggests he's actually not running the country. In any event the meaning of your "scare" quote is unclear. Is he really running the country? Is he running it badly? Is he running it as a dictator might? As one of the citations below says, "just say what you mean!" (2) (3)

Second line: Grammar - "foreign born" and "America hating" should be hyphenated. (4) "Best interest?" The US has only one? (-: Using the plural form would be better in this instance, but you won't get marked down for it. At three mistakes per sentence-like structure, there's no point in piling on.

Second line: Content - Untrue by inspection unless you personally saw his birth out of country or know someone personally who did. Otherwise you're bearing false witness and violating a commandment held sacred by both Christians and Jews. Ignoring one of the Ten Commandments tends to support the frequent conjecture that Mormons really aren't Christians and they don't share fundamental Christian beliefs. I kinda thought they did until I read this article:

Second line: Grammar - "foreign born America hating marxist" should be set off by commas as in "foreign-born, America-hating Marxist" (5)

Second line: Grammar - "marxist" should be capitalized. (6)

Second line: Content - Can you list some of the actions he's taken that qualify him as a Marxist that previous Republican presidents did NOT also engage in? Can you point to specific citations that show Obama hates America? Based on how well your educators taught you to write, I'm not sure your history teachers did any better in teaching you about the various political systems of the world. Do you have a heart and mind scanner? Is that how you were able to tell what's in Obama's heart? (-:

Citations:

(1)

says

(2)

(3)

[Kurt Ullman]

In article , "Robert Green" wrote: o open up the spigots on the Strategic Oil Reserve.

And I have consistently argued against it. Political expediency by any party is bad. Getting the president re-elected is NOT a strategic necessity.

What significant reduction in supply? It is pretty well established that the embargoes are leaking like a sieve and that the Saudis have done their bit to up production. There is the usual alternating between drawdowns and builds.

That is yet another reason to not hit it. Re-election of a president doesn't qualify as an emergency, especially if it is only temporary and only serves to kick cans further down the street.

There are others that disagree. Selective perception is very much a two-way street. (g).

[HeyBub]

I heard Lawrence J. Peter (discoverer of the "Peter Principle") observe: "I've been following governments, man and boy, for over forty years. I have yet to conclude whether we are being led by well-meaning fools or by really smart people who are just putting us on."

[Stormin Mormon]

Maybe that's why O keeps community organizing? it was the last position where he had competence?

I thought it was J. Lawrence Peter? Maybe my CRS is acting up. Or maybe my RCS?

Christopher A. Young Learn more about Jesus

.

I heard Lawrence J. Peter (discoverer of the "Peter Principle") observe: "I've been following governments, man and boy, for over forty years. I have yet to conclude whether we are being led by well-meaning fools or by really smart people who are just putting us on."

[Robert Green]

Republicans presidential candidates started this by blaming the President for the rise in gas prices. How on earth is someone supposed to counter charges that the president should fire three of his cabinet members for failing to get oil prices down or Newt's boast that he can get gas back down to $2.50 a gallon? There are consequences for lying and for trying to score political points. I don't like it much, either, but for reasons stated elsewhere, it doesn't bother me nearly as much as the urge to pump North Slope oil.

Obviously some people (Stormy, for one) believe these claims that it's the President's policy that's keeping gas above $2.50 a gallon. They seem to believe "If only we had an oil-friendly President like Bush, we could have cheap oil!" They are not living in reality. Just after Bush took office, gas was $1.45 a gallon. By June 2008, that price had spiked to over $4 a gallon. Yet some people still think "If only presidents were friendlier to Big Oil" we would have cheap gasoline.

Is the release naked political expediency? Probably. The true solution is to focus on the many things Obama has done that he's actually responsible for and not make insane claims. The law, however, lets the release happen because there's a "paper" slowdown. It's just like how the law allows the POTUS to fire all US Attorneys. Neither side ever seems terribly interested in changing such laws because they like them so much when they're in power.

There's at least a significant reduction in the supply of truth, for one. No one seems to realize that we consume far more oil than we have. We burn

20 percent of the world's oil but own only 2 percent of the oil reserves. That's the equation that drives the whole train. We could ramp up production, pump every drop we have and it's still not enough. By a longshot. Yet people believe that we've got all we need for centuries just out of reach. That's why I'd support a citizenship test for voting.

We depend on the world market because we have far less oil than we consume. We'll always be customers, not suppliers in the global scheme of things. The rush to get at ANWR is political. The Republicans want to drill there because someone told them they can't. They've conned a lot of Americans into thinking that there's enough oil there to change the whole equation and end our dependence on foreign oil. That's just not true. Unless we become incredibly more efficient, it will *never* be true.

The actual contribution of ANWR opened to the hilt isn't enough to move gas but a few cents downward for a little while. Its true value is in a world crisis where ocean oil shipments cease. THAT'S when we'll be very, very thankful that we have our own sources of oil. Some countries wouldn't be so lucky.

It should be a no-brainer to realize that if we depend THAT MUCH on foreign oil (and that can only change through conservation, not "drill, baby, drill") we had better make sure we can survive for a while without it. ANWR is our "nuclear rainy day" fund yet some people want to burn through it like crack addicts looking for their next fix. All to save from 5 or 10 cents on a gallon of gas.

Are you trying to tell us Republican presidents haven't released oil at suspiciously timed points? (-: If a release's only value is to trip up some speculators and drive them out of the market, well, then I am all for it. Oil is now grossly over-speculated. Perhaps the Bush tax cut freeing up so much cash for speculators has something to do with rising oil prices.

I guess we'll have to get into it. (-" There's a difference between basing tax policy on "back of the napkin" sketches and actual research. It seems that due to tax law quirks, researchers can now examine what happens under different tax schemes for the same classes of filers.

I'm beginning to think that slogan "if you tax the rich it will hurt everyone" is basically the biggest PR con job in world history. This country was in far, far better shape economically when the taxes on the rich were incredibly much higher than current levels. Apparently, if you leave them too much money, they RUIN it for everyone else by vastly increasing speculative activities that cause prices to skyrocket in housing, oil and food. (-"

-- Bobby G.

[HeyBub]

That's not exactly the case. Proven oil reserves total about 21 billion barrels. The Dept of the Interior estimates undiscovered, but available, reserves at 134 billion barrels. The Bureau of Land Management estimates there are 2 TRILLION bbls of potentially recoverable oil.

True, we use 20% of the world's oil, but we account for 25% of the world's GDP.

No. We import because we do not PRODUCE enough oil, not that we don't have it.

Agree. Oil is fungible, that is, one barrel of oil is pretty much like any other barrel of oil.

Not so. More oil produced domestically means a lower world-wide price for oil. The more oil we burn now, the sooner we'll find a proper substitute. That is, technology is dependent on oil; to cut back - to conserve - simultaneously means a cut-back on science and technology.

Arrant nonsense. What do you think the rich DO with their wealth? Stuff it in a mattress? No, they invest it and, in so doing, create jobs. Or they buy things. For example:

You may recall the 10% tax surcharge the Clinton administration levied on yachts costing more than $500,000. The result? The rich simply started buying their boats in the Bahamas. Dozens of yacht builders went out of business causing hundreds of workers their jobs.

[Kurt Ullman]

And most of the studies indicated that it cost more money in unemployment payouts than it took in.

[Robert Green]

That day's already here. The price has risen enough to make the energy-intensive tar sand extraction process economically feasible. Conservation is the only way we're going to be able to stretch out our existing supply of oil. We're still wasting incredible amounts of money in lots of our endeavors. The power required to keep all the cable TV boxes around the nation going is astounding.

Box makers say that the cable companies don't pay the electric bills for the boxes, and so demand instant availability over a "wake from sleep" device that could save millions of watts of electricity.

More than a big refrigerator.

-- Bobby G.

[bob haller]

time for federal regulation to cut power used