124.9
No, that’s not a new radio frequency. To me, that’s what the price of a gallon of gas should be. I just filled up my tank and it cost me $82.00 In the past, I have driven to Florida and not spent 82 bucks on gas! If your like me and got your drivers license in the 70’s you remember really cheap gas. (After I got my license, the first tank of gas I ever put in my ‘68 Plymouth Fury III cost me 11 dollars!) You also remember the oil embargo that led to gas lines, odd-even plate rationing, the Ford Pinto and the Chevy Vega! Remember people swearing that if the price of gas ever hit a dollar a gallon they would just stop buying it? I think that those same people now would gladly donate a kidney if the price of gas would go back to a dollar a gallon again! Even 2 dollars a gallon, which seemed unthinkable only a decade ago, now seems like a great bargain. But for most of the past three decades, I remember gas usually being around 124.9 a gallon. It was a nice number; you got 4 gallons for 5 bucks, 8 for ten, and so on. Remember OPEC? How every mention sent a shiver down your spine in fear the evil oil overlords would have one of their meetings and raise the price of a barrel of crude oil, thus raising the price at the pump? Whatever happened to OPEC anyway? These days, they’re about as intimidating as Fidel Castro. It seems that the free market (Wall Street) seized control of gas and oil prices awhile back and never let up. Remember when the price of gas really jumped up after Hurricane Katrina? We were told that the reason for this was that the storm had knocked out a large portion of our refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. Those refineries came back, and the price went down a bit, but then jumped up again when the threat of storms that could knock out the refineries made investors jittery. Nope, it’s no longer OPEC, but Wall Street that determines what you pay at the pump. Every day we are told supplies are up, use is down. But the price goes ever upward. Speculators fear tensions in the Persian Gulf Could lead to an interruption in supply, political instability in Venezuela, the banking crises, the Mets get rained out, Warren Buffet stubs his toe, pretty much anything causes speculators to get jittery and raise the price. (Maybe they should play some nice Perry Como music at the NYSE, and switch their coffee to de-caf, to keep these guys from being so jittery) And, to further illustrate just how toothless OPEC has become, last week they upped production by 300,000 barrels a day and Wall Street just sniffed and the price went up. Following that the President announced that we would no longer be adding to the strategic oil reserve, further increasing the supply. The price of gas? It went up again! What’s the answer here? I guess it would be great if one of those “don’t buy gas for one day” e-mails we all get from time to time actually worked, but we as a people are far too unorganized to ever get it together like that. And even if we did, they know we’re going to come back. They have us over a barrel, so to speak. So maybe it’s time the folks in D.C. to do something here. Me, I’m gonna start planting corn.