$2.29

[greencrest1272]

I dont give a damn if Ted Kennedy is president, if he could get gas prices down to about $1.50, I would support him.

By the way, Im sure Bush has a little red button in his office and when his checking account gets below $10,000,000 he can just push it and make gas prices soar and fill his account up. Give it a break man.

[imported_ut1]

If you did, then no one would have to tell you that the president has no control over gas prices. They started up before Bush ever became prez.
I fill up every two days...part of my job...so I've been keenly keeping up with fuel prices for the last 20 years.
Doesn't matter if its an Elephant or a Donkey in office, we all still get the short end of the stick.

[pvfan]

This argument is pointless cause I believe my way and you believe yours. If I was Bush and had his power I'd try to help out my oil buddies all I could. This is also the reason I have a hard time believing we are actively pursuing Bin Laden.

[imported_ut1]

There's no "my way" or "your way" to it. The fact of the matter is that some people think the prez is next in line in the power department to God. That will never happen as long as we have the check and balance system our forefathers were wise enough to put into effect to prevent another "king" or emperor" from evolving in these United States. They recognized that no one man (or woman) should have the kind of power some are trying to give the prez credit for having. Has nothing to do with politics.

[RaiderWahoo0105]

From what I've assessed about the news and from talking to my commerce friends throughout college I've assessed two things to contribute to the HUGE spikes in oil prices over the past couple of years.

#1 (this is huge). Up until recently, China had been a borderline third-world country, standing on the world's oil consumer list down somewhere in the teens. With massive economic reform and a shift more towards a more free-market based economy (like ours here in the good ol' U.S.), they've risen to #2 with all of the industrialization they have going on. This has GREATLY overstressed the supply/demand curve for oil throughout the world.

#2. A lot of people tend to have forgotten this, but LAST summer the hurricane season was also horrible (no where near as bad as what we've seen this year though). A lot of refineries were hit hard down in the Gulf, and this shoved the price of gas into the above $2.00 threshold that we are used to as of the present.

Of course there are billion other factors involved. I.E. the ongoing wars/battles/etc... in the Middle East errode consumer confidence raising the price of oil, the creation of OPEC back in the 70's (which sadly was the US's brainchild as well), or better yet and growing sense of awareness that most of the world's known oil reserves are being depleted (this none of us can control) - which also alters market value of crude oil and hence gasoline.

And additionally, oil as a market commodity does not follow a simple supply demand curve such as say X-box 360's. For you economic's majors you know that the "oil curve" follows an irregular pattern where price depends on a whole lot more factors beyond supply and demand.

If anything the price of gasoline in the United States is kept artificially LOW... Yes for those of you who think you are politically inclined and well informed, the government is to blame for the price of oil to an extent, but not to the extent that you hard core leftists would like to imagine so (I'm a centrist who leans far right on some topics and far left on others btw).

What does ARTIFICIALLY low mean? Look at the price of gasoline in Europe, how expensive is it? You will typically find that a European pays about twice as much for a LITER of gasoline compared to what we pay for a gallon. On first glance this doesn't make much sense because in Europe they have much better standards of public transportation. Families typically only have 1 car at most unless you are wealthy. Compare that to our great nation which is huge and spread out (a blessing and a downfall). We depend more on individual transportation and hence use up more gasoline per person than anywhere else in the world (the fact that we are also richer and can afford more personal automobiles helps us use up more gas).
So even given the complex supply-demand relationship, one would expect that since we use up SO much gas, our gas prices should be much higher than in Europe. The fact of the matter is that our government has known from the beginning that we would be a heavily gasoline dependent economy to help each of us make the long treks to work since most of us don't live near subways. As a result oil companies have been given huge tax breaks to keep the price of gasoline low since the turn of the 20th century.

If you hard core lefties want the US government to absolve itself of its influence in gas prices and let our gas prices more accurately follow the oil-gasoline supply-demand curve that exists world wide, I hope you all can start stomaching upwards of 6-7$$$$ a gallon.

If you notice, the Europeans don't whine as much as we do when gas shoot up 50 cents a gallon or so because to them it's such a smaller percentage of an increase.

With that rant being said, I do believe the oil giants in the U.S. are guilty of price gouging in wake of the hurricane as they should have used their excess profits to either find more oil resources or invest in cost-cutting measures instead of redirecting the money back into their fat CEO paystubs. I think this is an area where government regulation needs to step in immediately. But for those of you who are so hardcore anti-Bush you would follow the next Democratic presidential candidate even if he decided to copy and paste some of the tenets of the Nazi party into the practices of the DNP, you make me sick. Bush is not a very good president I will give you that, but I believe most of you anti-Bush people are just jumping on the liberal band wagon because MTV tells you it's the cool thing to do. I'd like to take a poll of all you local democrats who are against gay marriage/life-partner benefits. The majority don't even know philosophically what it means to be politically "liberal".

Granted Bush may suck in a lot of ways, but I'd like to see some intelligent criticism from people. Read some friggin' books and then respond back to me.

Get an education before you open your mouths.

[oakland_raiders]

what pisses me off about the gas situation is the fact that the people who argue most of the time are driving the most non fuel efficient vehicles

[pvfan]

George Bush's Family and Bin Laden are the founders of Arbusto Energy. The company has so many political ties it's ridiculous. $4.7 Million dollars was gained through "political supporters" of the Regan/Bush Administration during the 1980's. Bush was given 13% of the stock in the company. Two months before Iraq invaded Kuwait, on June 20, 1990, the younger Bush sold two-thirds of his Harken stock, 212,140 shares at $4 a share-for a total of $848,560.
"That was $318,430 more than it was worth," Dr. Arthur F. Ide, author of George W. Bush: Portrait of a Compassionate Conservative, said. "George W. broke the law to do this since the transaction was an insider stock sale."

Now, lets do the math. Bush has direct ties to the Bin Laden family through Oil. They help him with insider info so he can sell his stock. It's Bush's turn to help out right? Lets go to Iraq. Bush can get rid of Hussein (the man who tried to kill his father) and help raise oil prices. This helps out his old friends the Bin Laden's who scratched his back years earlier.

[CoeburnCane]

</font><blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr />
If you hard core lefties want the US government to absolve itself of its influence in gas prices and let our gas prices more accurately follow the oil-gasoline supply-demand curve that exists world wide, I hope you all can start stomaching upwards of 6-7$$$$ a gallon.


[/ QUOTE ]

If it ever did that RW01, you'd better bet that one of those NRA card carrying gun toting "hard core righties" would save money to buy the gas to go down to his local ammo store, or even better, just order off the internet, a nice lil scope for their hunting rifle and we'd have a JFK "back and to the left" moment all over again. Our president would get assassinated if prices ever got that high.

In terms of supply vs. demand, gas is HIGHLY demand inelastic and highly elastic in the case of supply--new reserves are found everyday, and old ones are drying up quicker than that. So you're right to a point--a regular supply demand curve for gasoline or crude oil in the US is irregular, but that's only if you don't see that gasoline has become a necessity item in this country. Throw out all the external causes for a regular curve to be irregular for this item--it doesn't work here. Necessity items are always high on demand with varying extremes of supply availability, so there is no "curve" per se, there are merely points along the line of demand, and if you graphed demand versus supply, it would end up being a descending straight line. The less demand, the higher supply. The higher demand, the less supply.

Yes I'm an economics/accounting major. [img]/LDPforum/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img] This is just my way of looking at gas prices--if prices go up, it means for the most part consumption has gone up and supply is strained already and cannot keep up. Prices will only go down with greater regulation of supply or demand (supply regulation = greater rationing/newer sources, demand regulation = more efficient vehicles).

BTW--I'm not going to act like I know it all...if someone who is studying economics right now knows better than I do about the supply and demand relationship and has a more recent definition of things, please feel free to share. My econ's a little rusty seeing as how I use my accounting daily.

[oakland_raiders]

it would not surprise me to see gas that high because 2 years ago i was on a cruise in Grand Caymon and gas was $5.50 a gallon and that was 2 years ago

[RaiderWahoo0105]

All good points from people. The government definitely does its part to exacerabate the oil problem, but I stick with my guns that it definitely is not the number one cause (i.e. see the rising power that is China).

Bush's foreign economic policies do suck no doubt, e.g. his unfair embargo on cheaper/higher quality Japanese steel during his fair term which almost caused the WTO to put huge ass embargos on the U.S., and though I've heard about the Bush family's connections to the oil of the Middle East I wouldn't put it all on them (although I'm sure they are damn well guilty for a lot of bad things over there).

If I weren't a pre-med, I would've liked to study foreign economics; it's good to get some educatied input from people instead of simply spouting "Bush Sucks" and decrying all who do not agree with them as gay-hating male chauvenistic pigs who like dumping toxic waste in rainforests while killing third-world orphans who do not perform to standard in sweatshops, who give their wives cheetah fur coats.

In the next presidential elections, my allegiance will be more practical than idealistic this time and I'm trying to get as much knowledge as I can to support the best choice for my interests in the next presidency.