Out of curiosity, I wanted to look up retail gas prices for the years of the Clinton Administration. This is what I found (via Wikipedia).
If you notice, gas prices were approximately $1.50 per gallon when Clinton entered office in 1992 and were approximately $1.65 per gallon when Clinton left in 2001. It was at a low when gas went below $1.20 per gallon in 1999. These figures, are of course, inflation adjusted for 2007 dollars.
Further, you can look at the graph and see that during the Clinton Administration, gas prices remained relatively stagnant. The huge jump in retail gas prices began, when, kiddies? After 2001, when Bush took office.
To look at it another way, when Bush took office, gas was $1.65 per gallon. It is, as of right now, according to AAA on May 19, 2008, $3.79 per gallon. That's a 130% increase. Clinton's overall gas price increase was 10%. This is just my rough mathematical calculation (could have an error), using the data above. If someone out there finds different data, by all means, provide it. But the point I'm making is that the gas price increase is not normal nor random. I hypothesize that this abnormal gas price increase is directly or indirectly related to George W. Bush's failed policies. Worse yet, he probably doesn't care.
One might certainly argue that 9/11 might have made gas prices jump, but remember this: gas prices shot up during the 1973 OPEC oil embargo to similar prices (when adjusted for inflation) but they also came back down.
Does anyone see these prices coming back down? And further, conservatives love to rail against so-called socioeconomic policies that redistributes wealth from the rich to the poor (which isn't necessarily a bad thing) but what do you call this, when many families, middle class and poor, have to pay more for the same gas? Isn't this also a redistribution of wealth, but from the poor to the rich?
What will Americans have to sacrifice to be able to afford $8.00/gallon gasoline?
3 comments:
"What will Americans have to sacrifice to be able to afford $8.00/gallon gasoline?"
Well, if you believe what a lot of people have been saying for years, the current price of gasoline still greatly underestimates its true (environmental, and other) costs.
So a better question might be: "What will Americans have to sacrifice to be able to continue treating $8.00/gallon gasoline as if it only costs half that?"
Bruce:
Very true. We also have some of the "cheapest" gas in the industrialized world, where in other countries it is much more expensive due to the taxes on it.
But, these countries all have much more reliable public transportation than we do. Detroit, of course, is just an example.
I guess my main problem with this whole mess is that we should have taken a far easier route: HEAVILY pushed (via government incentives, tax rebates, ANYTHING) the electric car when gas was still much cheaper.
That way, the transition would have been smooth and not hurt the consumer. Unfortunately, it seems public policy, at least for the time being, wants to drain all fossil fuel resources dry before we approach things like the electric car (or an alternative, bankrupting the working class in the process.
But you're right: our gas is still cheap compared to what it SHOULD cost.
If we first raise energy prices, then all those alternatives become much easier to promote.
If we do it in the other order, pushing alternatives without raising fuel prices, then we lower the cost of (some forms of) transportation, with the risk that people may just be encouraged to consume more transportation of all kinds. That's probably already happened to some degree: more efficient cars (and transit, used *together* with cars--look at the size of some of those park-and-ride lots...) both allow employees to move further out to cheaper real estate.
And of course the other great advantage of higher fuel prices is that they help us decide which technologies or behavior changes really do conserve: we don't really want government agencies (or individual consumers) to be stuck trying to do complicated error-prone calculations to sort out this stuff by hand.
If I ditch the car and get my groceries delivered, is there a net gain? How much of one? And how do I know which grocery store is making more efficient use of fuel? And what about *their* suppliers? If fuel prices are higher then all those various middlemen have incentives to get these calculations right as they go, and the result of all those little calculations gets factored into the final price.
Post a Comment