The American automakers are still producing more and more big SUV's and trucks. Ford and GM are in big financial trouble for more reasons than one. Their investment in gas guzzlers is one of them.
I have nothing against trucks, I love my 77 F-250, but at 8 MPG it is extremely expensive to drive, and therefore, sits in the driveway a lot. Many people need big vehicles for work and they will certainly be impacted by higher prices.
However, this excerpt from the article rases an interesting "proposition" that seems to be completely overlooked in our society by the public as well as the media:
But the reality is that the "record high gas prices" are a myth. The U.S. Department of Energy records show that when you adjust for inflation the price of gas is now lower than it's been for most of the twentieth century. Prices are lower now than they were 25 years ago. Yes, they price is up from the 1998 all time low of $1.19, but they are a dollar lower than they were in the early 1980s.
When I told this to people at the gas station they didn't believe me. And why should they? The media keep telling us about the record high prices — they're just not adjusting for inflation!
I also like the last few paragraphs:
I asked people to compare the price of gas to bottled water or ice cream you can buy inside the gas station. Most people were sure the gas was more expensive. But they're wrong.
If you took the average price of a bottle of water, a gallon would cost nearly $7. A gallon of Haagen Dazs ice cream would set you back nearly $30 — 15 times the price of gas.
And think about how much harder it is to produce gasoline.
First, oil has to be sucked out of the ground … sometimes from deep beneath an ocean or underneath ice or from the Middle East where workers risk their lives. And just to get to the oil often means the drill may have to bend and dig sideways through as many five miles of earth. What oil companies find then has to be delivered through long pipelines or shipped in monstrously expensive ships, then converted into three different formulas of gasoline, trucked in trucks that cost more than $100,000 and then your local gas station has to spend a fortune on safety devices to make sure you don't blow yourself up.
Gas is actually a bargain, not that you'll hear that from most of the media.
The raw dollar amounts of gas are at record highs. When you think about it, so is virtually everything else! Fifty years ago you could buy a candy bar for 10 cents. Now they're 5 times that. A new car in the 60's could be had for $2,000 or less. A fully loaded 26' Airstream Land Yacht could be had for a whopping $6,000. A
new house could have bought for less than $20,000. I don't hear anyone complaining about those things. The most common mistakes is
not adjusting for inflation!
