From Neal Boortz:
With every single paycheck the Imperial Federal Government seizes about 14% of the money you have earned. This money is put into an income redistribution fund from which you may or may not draw a check when and if you reach a certain age. Die too soon and that money goes to someone else .. not to your heirs. Live long enough and you may .. just may … get most of your money back, though there is no legal guarantee that you’ll get a cent.
Yet here you sit pissing and moaning about gas prices.
According to the AAA, one year ago the price of regular was $2.929. Today that price is $3.114. That’s an 18.5 cents per gallon increase over the past year.
Now we go for the average gas mileage for cars in the U.S. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says that as of 2004 the average mpg for new cars sold in the U.S. was 24.7. In 1980 it was 23.1. So, to make a point here, we’re going to go even below the average price for 1980. We’re going to use 20 mpg.
Now … for those of you who went to government schools, I’ll do the math for you. You’re driving your family of four 1400 miles to get to Disney World and back. That means you’ll be burning 70 gallons of gas at 20 mpg. The gas is now 18.5 cents more expensive than it was last year. Let’s go ahead and round that UP to 20 cents. So, we burn 70 gallons and each gallon costs 20 cents more than it cost last year. That’s going to cost you an amazing $14.00.
Oh .. and you people driving to and from work need to be outraged too! Are you doing your share of the whining?
The average commute to and from work in this country is 16 miles. Now of course we know that cars don’t get the mileage on a stop-and-go commute as they do on the road, so we’re going to lower the gas mileage figure from 20 to 15. So, you’re driving 32 miles (on the average) to get to work and back every day. That is gobbling up about 2.13 gallons of gas. Go back to that 18.5 cents per gallon increase over last year and you’ll see that you’re spending about 40 cents more for gas for your commute this year than you were last year. That would be about $2.00 a week. Less than the price of a decaf skinny latte at Starbucks. A lot less.
Come on people, wake up! Your governments — local, state and federal — are stealing money from you every single day to fund vote-buying programs. Your local elected officials are ripping you off to support welfare artists and to study the mating habits of Polish zlotnika pigs. How do you think they feel when they see you griping about gas prices? They LOVE it! They steal you blind and there you sit complaining because you’re going to have to spend $14.00 more to drive your family to Disney World and back. They take 14% of the money you earn every day — money you may or may get back with virtually no interest — and you’re spinning around on your eyebrows because you’re spending 40 cents a day more to get to that job and back home again!
Blaming “Big Oil” for high gas prices is a little like blaming McDonald’s for obesity, or blaming guns for killing people. But wait a minute … isn’t that exactly what the Democrats have been trying to do for years?
Americans love large SUVs, trucks and cars with high horsepower, and all of those things aren’t fuel efficient. So rather than look at ourselves, realize that we’re the problem, and start burning less fuel on our end, we applaud our Government bloviators for trying to remove the profit from companies that actually pull from the ground and refine that gasoline. We should actually be encouraging them to do more, not punish them. And you can rest assured that the faceless entity that is “Big Oil” won’t feel the punishment - they’ll just pass along those additional taxes onto real people like you through even higher gasoline prices.
Over the last 10 years the oil industry has invested $47 billion to comply with new environmental controls rather than construct new capacity, according to the American Petroleum Institute. Compliance with sulfur standards alone cost about $20 billion. Care to guess at who will finally pay that $20 billion pricetag?
There hasn’t been a new oil refinery built in America since 1976 and with existing plants working close to capacity, even a minor outage in a plant can impact the price of oil; we’re still feeling the pinch from Hurricane Katrina. A combination of tight environmental restrictions, not-in-my-back-yard community opposition, and the high cost of new construction has been an impediment to additional capacity. The combination of limited spare crude production capacity and oil refining capacity will continue to bolster prices.
So we have gasoline refining unable to keep up with the demand, partially due to environmental restrictions and local opposition. Add to that all the taxes the government keeps saddling a gallon of gasoline with. Top it all off with our hunger for SUV’s and other inefficient vehicles. But the public wants, instead, to blame the oil companies for all their woes?
Sort of like blaming McDonald’s for obesity.
gas price, refinery, oil, gasoline
