Gas Up The Pacer

The northern winds these last few days have made the bike ride rather unpleasant, if only because I can't make it with just a sweater; I need the shell, but it's just not cold enough for both, so I sweat like a pig. It's just the worst temperature, 42 degrees -- the first two miles are cold as hell while I'm roasting for the remaining ten.

Yet, there are other bicyclists out there, and I'm impressed. They usually aren't moving quite so fast so the wind chill is lower, probably making their rides more comfortable. I am wondering -- are they out there because gasoline is $3 a gallon?

This was the price point that would destroy the American economy, remember? Eighty dollars a barrel and the airlines would implode, trucks would be idled, that sorta thing. Yet, because the price has only slowly climbed, apparently we don't complain about it, and the silver birds are still airborne, and the silver trucks are still motoring. $3? Meh...just suck it up and continue to gas up the pacer. It's just the price we have to pay in America.

I find this interesting, the public perception/reaction to gasoline. I love to watch news clips of complaining Americans. I would love to be a reporter at a gas station, asking random people their thoughts on the price. How many of them would share my view that it should be tripled? Not-a-one. It's all those wicked oil companies and their wicked Arabian co-conspirators, they'd say, while never lowering their own consumption.

As my SMUD raises electricity rates by 13%, as the cable bill rises, as water and sewer definitely rise, and as gasoline and diesel hover around three bucks we are reducing the average American ability to go out and buy real shit, you know, consumables and cyclicals, the things that make our economy go-run.

I should know. I got a raise at the beginning of the year but my health insurance premium rose more than the raise, so I'm making less. For all those still employed who didn't get a raise, I'm pretty sure their health insurance costs also rose. Granted, at least these dollars are funneled into that 16% slice of our our economy represented by health care. But it doesn't stimulate the remaining 70% that's based on us buying stuff. We are all buying less because we are making [relatively] less.

But...we're paying more for gasoline and we aren't hiring more American drill crews or refiners these days, and we aren't about to back off on that consumption and ride the bicycle one day a month or horrors! ride the bus one day a quarter. That's money that mostly goes overseas, never to return. Sure, some of it is recycled back to us via exports, but not all of it.

Will gasoline stay at $3? No idea. It'll stagger around a while, but I forecast it to continue to go up, while our economy sputters and falters.