What do you think is a reasonable price to pay for gasoline?
December 15th, 2008 at 03:48pm Chuck Sweeny
Gas prices are as low as they’ve ever been. When I started buying gas in 1966, I paid 33 cents a gallon. Using the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis’s handy-dandy inflation conversion chart,I should be paying $2.20 a gallon today. Instead, I’m paying $1.55.9.
So, if the roller coaster peaked at $4.59 in July, it could go lower. But eventually prices will stabilize.
What do you think is a reasonable price to pay for gasoline, today, and during the next five years?
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2 Comments Add your own
1. hokumboy | December 16th, 2008 at 9:20 am
Chuck,
Do you want to know the dream price with, or without, the taxes? This summer our family was gassing up 3 cars every payday. And we survived. With one of us on a pension.
I’m personally OK with the $4.59 price if the majority of the cost was in the form of taxes used to improve our infrastructure instead of public assistance to the indigent oil companies who are now whinning about not making enough of their obscene profits.
With the higher tax we might keep a lot of our usage down to a minimum, which would help the environment, and finally start to develop our public transportation system so we don’t need to depend on our personal vehicles for every trip we feel we have to make. I realize that most times we need to use our car, but there are many times we could use other methods.
We shudder at the thought of riding a bus to work, and yet think nothing of sending our kids to and from school one one every day. Are we better than our children?
Why are we still waiting for our train to Chicago? We should have had one years ago. Hell, even a shuttle to one of the existing lines wouldn’t be that horrible. Would it? In the 20’s and 30’s we had Interurbans to travel to neighboring towns. Why not now? We could easily hop ride to Harvard or Elgin, connect, and take the Metra into Chicago. I think we’ve got a better chance of getting a train from Santa than we do from our County Board. Of course, Santa doesn’t worry about who will make the most money from the enterprise.
2. coldhotel | December 18th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
I think $3 a gallon with a tax mechanism to support that level is ok. The extra revenue should be used to make energy efficiency investments or to develop alternate energy sources. 3 bucks is enough to spur conservation without too much of an adverse effect on the economy.
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