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Gasoline prices....

WebSlave

WebSlave

It is what it is, but certainly not what it was.
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Beautiful day out today so I took the vette out for a ride. Along the way I noticed that the local Shell station has regular gas for $3.09 a gallon now. I checked my records and on 12/30/2020 when I took out the Jeep to get the tank filled up, regular was $2.19 a gallon at that time. :ack2:

OK, so what caused this drastic price increase now?

Just seems like life lately is akin to swimming through a thick swarm of sea nettles and Portuguese Man of War jelly fish. Sort of makes you just want to get out of the water, doesn't it?
 
over a 1 dollar a gallon raise since Trump left office. Reminds me of last time when gas prices were horrible actually worse. Oh wait yeah the current president was vice president then.......and it will be the same almost 4 dollars a gallon it was then im sure before the year ends
 
Interesting chart on the differences in gas prices depending on which party the president belongs to:

https://www.idrivesafely.com/defens...rats-vs-republicans-gas-prices-last-100-years

Adjusted for inflation, there is an $0.08 difference (higher during Democratic presidencies) -- between 3-4%. Of course, it would be completely unfounded to suppose that there is a direct correlation between party and gas prices -- global economic trends and political stability affect both presidential wins and gasoline prices.

Don't make me dictator, though -- I'd make gas $17 a gallon and use the funds to provide stuff that people actually need, including wages that would make the hike more bearable for the people on the bottom of the pile, and roads that are worth driving on, and wildlife reserves so animals can have a place to live that isn't fragmented by roads. My car gets 40+mpg, and I wouldn't walk 40 miles to save $17, so it looks like a great value to me.

Or I'd price gasoline (which is a necessity) as a percentage of wealth. The average hourly wage is around $25 -- suppose gas would be priced at 10 gallons an hour. People earning the federal minimum would pay $0.78 a gallon. Per this article, Jeff Bezos would pay $1.34 million a gallon. If anyone who makes $80,000 a year complains about $4 gas, they can walk. ;)

Letting something like the price of energy change with the wind, or whether some sheik is pissy, or whether Russia takes control of Citgo to destabilize markets, or some other irrelevant cause is caveman thinking.

I'm not serious about most of this, of course, but beyond the practical problems of implementing this sort of stuff I think it is worth considering the ideas behind it.
 
Well, from 12-30-2020 to today (03-14-2021) I am seeing a 41% increase in the price of gasoline from one presidential administration to the next. And the fat lady hasn't sung yet.
 
https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/gasoline-inflation-in-the-united-states/

Yes the price of fuel is up, because as people have returned to on-site work and children have returned to in-classroom instruction there is more demand for it. It would be higher still if people still if people were flying at pre-COVID rates.

Also bear in mind that a lot of people are still working from home and will continue to do so since their employers have realized that they are just as productive, and they don't need the overhead of office space.
 
Gas was crazy cheap in the 1990s. Prices climbed a lot between 2000-2008, and dropped quite a bit from 2008 average to 2009 average. Make an argument from those stats, and I get a completely different result. It is simple confirmation bias.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/204740/retail-price-of-gasoline-in-the-united-states-since-1990/

Also, Melinda's points make me realize that people's responses to the pandemic and everything that is fallout from it is the one big determinant of every big picture issue currently. We're not going to get back to your regularly scheduled broadcast for a long time.
 
Heck, when I was late teens, gasoline (high test) was costing me something like 35 cents per gallon. My GTO at the time was draining me because it was costing me around $5 every couple of days (or was it every day? :shrug01: ) going back and forth to work. I guess the engine work and those 4.10 differential gears had something to do with that. And I believe my right foot was a LOT heavier back then too. :hehe:
 
WebSlave said:
And I believe my right foot was a LOT heavier back then too. :hehe:
Click to expand...

Yep, those were good times, when we drove real cars! Big engines, 4 barrel carbs, and metal in places that are all plastic now. Thank you, government MPG mandates :mad:

I remember gas being around 40 cents a gallon, but our Firebirds, Torinos, and old pickup trucks drank gas like it was going out of style!
 
Summer, 2008: my old minivan transmission gave up the ghost and fixing it would cost more than it was worth. Plus, I needed something to tow a horse trailer.

At the time gas was hovering around $4/gal.

Checked online, found that (no surprise) prices for larger pickups and SUV's were cratering and they were sitting onto the dealer lots for months. Looked at online availability, took a lightly used 3/4 ton Suburban 4x4 w/ 454 V8 that had been on the lot for six months for a test drive, haggled a bit on the price, paid by certified check later that day. I still have it w/ over 450k miles on it.

If gas goes over $4-5 per gallon again soon I might just retire it and get another.
 
Presidents have very little to do with gas pricing. Global market and issues such as the Texas freeze, hurricanes, flooding, terrorism cause huge spikes. Summer always increases gas prices due to demand. It doesn't matter how much USA produces as it will be sold at Global Market price. We get no discounts where ever the oil comes from. A president can ask countries like Saudi Arabia to increase production to help lower pricing but it is not some magical fix or huge reduction in price. Oil, tobacco and alcohol can name their price.
 
I can remember as a youngster my dad, who used to own an Esso (later to become Exxon) gas station, complaining during a time when prices were rising very fast, for one reason or another. The problem was that when he would sell out of the current stock of gasoline he had in the ground, the prices increased so fast that the money earned from selling the gasoline at today's price was not enough to pay to get the tanks refilled tomorrow or next week. So gasoline retailers were forced to have to speculate on the future prices, and price the current stock of gasoline accordingly so they could afford to stay in business. If they guessed too low, they chance winding up just breaking even, with just enough "profit" to pay for the next load of gasoline. Or even losing money for every delivery. So prices would jump tremendously at the pumps because the retailers HAD to do it that way. They had no way of knowing what the gasoline would cost tomorrow, next day, or next month, so they had to work off of worst case predictions or go out of business in a hurry.

This would happen all the way up the chain of production, and you can see how it would snowball in a hurry.
 
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