Got gas?
All together now…Four bucks sucks!
All together now…Four bucks sucks!
Ah, yes. The price of petrol at the pump is a prime topic all over again. I wonder what folks had to talk about when hay-fueled horsepower moved the world?
I suppose it all goes back to Henry Ford’s Model T – the machine that made the internal combustion engine the prime mover of American life. If the Stanley’s Steamer or the Baker Electric had been the car to make the ‘20’s roar, the Saudis would be the world’s largest exporter of sand and the Strait of Hormuz would be important only to Jeopardy! contestants. But America has suffered from gas pains off and on for better than a hundred years and it seems we’re still looking to come up with a cure.
Ever since Edwin Drake drilled that first oil well it seems every generation’s had its petroleum fueled tale of woe. First the whalemen whined about cheap kerosene sinking the market for rendered blubber. Then the farriers and stablemen groused how gasoline turned the wheels of commerce faster than Old Dobbin could run. Great grampa blamed old man Rockefeller for keeping the price so high. Grandpa growled about Hitler and Hirohito starting the war that made gas hard to come by. Dad had no such problems as competing filling stations gave away drinking glasses and started price wars to entice drivers to pull in and fill up…at least until OPEC got its Shieks together, put a plug in the pipeline and for the next fifty years was a worldwide pain in the wallet.
And that pain is back…
More than four bucks for my last fill at the neighborhood Kwik Trip. Probably less in St. Charles. More across the creek… better than a buck more than I paid a year ago.
I guess that’s the price I’m paying to bomb Iran back into the stone age.
Now I don’t regard moderately priced motor fuel to be a primary constituent of my well being, but considering that I have no particular interest in returning Persia to the paleolithic, the policy that promoted this precipitous price perturbation pisses me off.
As it does a lot of other folks.
Particularly, I presume, a bunch of those who voted for a guy who promised cheap gas and no more wars.
Well, fool me once…
In a typical bit of heinie covering the Current Occupant is suggesting the fed forgo collection of the gas tax to make the situation less combustible. Well the 18 cents a gallon Uncle Sam gets to fill potholes and fix bridges isn’t gonna make a major dent in anyone’s cost of living – the only dent it will make is in the rim when your tire hits the crater lack of funding left unfixed.
Fool me once.