howeird | Gas Guzzling (Reply)

It's not just that finding gas at $3.11/gal is now a bargain, and how we're being gouged by the oilcompanies. It's how the nation was set up.

According to the US Department of Energy, gas was selling for around $1/gal for most of 1991-1999.

Toward the end of 1999, it rose to $1.27 and continued to climb slowly until Sept. 2001, when it peaked at $1.52. Then it dropped back to about $1, where it held steady through the new car sales season. March 2002 it started going up slowly again, but not enough to panic the SUV sales trends. Then prices started a steady rise, reaching about $2 in October 2004. By this time I think most folks who wanted a big gas guzzler had bought one, confident that gas prices would go down again, or at least stay relatively stable.

But in August 2005 it jumped to $2.50, then $2.90 in September. There was a slight dip back to the $2.50 range, and now we're up at $3 and more.

The numbers show that the consumer was lulled into a false sense of security, and after they had invested in expensive fuel hogs with huge gas tanks, the price was yanked up. Demand was created artificially by the cheap supply, and is being kept high by the guzzler cars, which are too expensive to keep but hard to sell.