Fill 'Er Up

It is dawning on the nation’s elected officials that the price of gasoline and heating oil is pinching the people who elected them. Having spent the last generation in a coma when it came to gas, oil, electricity or any other form of energy, they have come alive, well half alive, and are discussing a variety of goofy, unworkable or short sighted responses to the meteoric rise in fuel prices.

In Hawaii they are talking about putting price controls on wholesale gas. With price controls comes shortages and black markets where rich people get all the gasoline they want and ordinary people get to whistle.

In New Jersey they are discussing selling the toll roads and using the money to keep gas prices down. And after they have used up the toll road money, then what?

Wisconsin, Michigan and Missouri are thinking about a state sales tax holiday on gasoline. And how will the lost revenue be made up?

In Massachusetts where the winters are chilly the talk is of a moratorium on natural gas price increases. The gas companies will then sell their product in states where price is legally a function of demand and the people of the Bay State can hop into bed and bundle to stay warm.

In Washington DC, where gas is always in surplus although it is not the kind you can use to heat your home, they have come up with a new idea - - a Senate investigation. That should knock at least 50 cents off the price of a gallon of gasoline.

There are only two ways to get the price of gasoline down. Make it plentiful or use less of it. Aside from the pleasure of booting Saddam out of Kuwait, the big pay off from Iraq War I was a decade of cheap oil. Thank you Bush Senior and no thank you Bush Junior because you bungled it. From the moment you dropped your first bomb, the prices started to climb.

As for using less, Jimmy Carter was the one President who tried. His program was flawed, but it wasn’t bad for a first pass. Instead we’ll have conservation via high prices and the oil companies, never ones to lose a trick, are converting their tanker trucks into buses. Public transportation at last.