Saturday, April 07, 2012

QotD: Rite of Spring Edition

All the signs of spring are in the air: Flowers blooming, grass growing, birds singing, Congress bloviating over the need to Do Something About Gas Prices.

The Adaptive Curmudgeon noted that, like Christmas decorations, it seems to start earlier every year lately.
Looks like a dozen years of generally earlier onset of “gasoline psychosis”, albeit with a brief remission in 2011. Only time will tell what will happen in 2013 but if trends continue it’ll be somewhere between early April or mid/early March.

Of course, Congress could learn that gasoline, like everything, is subject to market forces. Ha ha ha…I’m just kidding. Bet on an outbreak of cluelessness in April 2013 and you’ll probably have called it a year in advance.
(Italics and implied facepalming in original.)

4 comments:

Larry said...

The last time our legislature "did something" about gas prices, they noted that the prices had gone up and hiked up the tax rates accordingly (NC has a sliding scale on gas taxes).
If it's all the same to you I'd prefer they did nothing, thanks. It has the advantage of having never been tried.

Les Jones said...

Everyone forgets that Candidate Obama had this all figured out in 2008.

Obama Insists Inflating Tires Better Than Oil Drilling

Kristophr said...

The doubling of gas prices since 2008 was caused by the doubling of the money supply.

If the federal government wants to cause gas prices to drop back to 2008 levels, they need to decrease M3, by collecting the same amount of money they had spent via kited checks since 2008, and then electronically demonetize it

I.E., burn the money after collecting it.

I don't see that happening any time soon.

Anonymous said...

Having worked in the oil industry for 25 years now, I have seen this yearly cycle routinely.

Frankly I am fed up with it now. You don't like our product? Don't buy it. I don't mind. I am sure I can find someone else who will buy it.

Want to investigate and tax my industry? Go ahead, we will just pass the costs back onto to you the consumer. We don't care (really we don't). We know you will buy our stuff no matter what price the Saudi's put on our oil so go ahead, make my day.

Investigate us, raise our taxes, windfall profits us, we will just turn around and pass the price right back on to the consumer. Take care and enjoy that $4/gallon. Soon it could be $5 if the government "helps".