Gas Prices

[propman]

Tonight on the news they said by spring gas will be $4.00 a Gal. By the end of 2012 it will be $5.00 a Gal. Man the oil Co. are making record profit now, there going to put the screws to us . propman

[Adam Bomb]

Sure is a bunch of B.S. if you ask me. Times are bad enough in our state and this is just another thing to dip into the little money people have. Sad.

[GLF]

I read about this a couple of days ago. Some guy from shell predicting this. Seems like whenever they "predict" the oil prices to go up, they do. I would like them to predict they are going to go down.

Unfortunately oil is traded as a commodity, and opec would like to see the price of oil at at least $100 per barrel.

So much for the economy recovering.

[1mainiac]

The price of oil has less to do with it than the taxes and government requirements. Secondly this is all the result of printing money to fix a spending problem. Kinda like having a wife who charges way to much and getting her more credit cards. The more the Fed prints the less each piece is worth you can't just print a trillion dollars and not have it affect the current value of other currency in circulation. Step back in time and you will see the only major change is the numbers in 1970 30 cent would buy a gallon of gas 3000 would get a nice new car and 12000 would get you a nice house minimum wage was about 1.65 move up 40 years and the only thing you don't multiply by 10 is minimum wage. And the reason minimum wage did not go up is we stopped buying stuff made here and people are much lazier everyone wants a nice sit on their butt job making 70k a year. If you remove the Federal State and Local taxes from gas it would be cheaper now then it was 40 years ago. One other issue is our refineries are old and seriously outdated cause no one will allow new ones to be built the NIMBY's win every time on that one. So we can't add capacity and for all the BS about going green cars get worse mileage than they did 10 years ago my truck gets close to 5 mpg less than it did when I bought it because the garbage we are forced to buy has less power per gallon. Now before I get hit with how we have cars getting 30 mpg now that has never been a high number my 1969 Cadillac Sedan DeVille weighed darn near 5000 lbs and had a 472 cu in motor which would melt the tires on command and I averaged close to 21mpg. I had a early 80's Escort GT that I don't think ever dropped below 34 mpg. My younger brothers Civic got around 50 mpg in daily driving these were all except the Escort, carburetor engines. With the new technology we have there should be dozens of cars pushing 50 or better mpg the problem is that requires quality fuel and the EPA will never allow it they would prefer to see us using alternative fuels that take as much energy to make as they produce and can't be made profitably without subsidies.

[Pioneer]

When you devalue the dollar, have soccer moms driving suburbans, and have something like gas (oil) priced on FUTURES that are influenced by anyone who wants to be the next Gordon Gekko what do you expect. I would love to see the 472 Caddy that gets 21 mph.

[Paulywood]

I read the same article stating this but every other expert is saying $3.50. Only the guy saying $5 gets the publicity. Either way it is because of GW opening up the commodities market. Now everyone with a nickel can speculate on oil futures. There is no more control. Although I'm sure GW didn't get any money from the oil companies:)

[1mainiac]

Oil speculation is cool cause those guys lose as often as win but like the government never let a crisis go to waste. And if you look it up GM played around with a variable venturi carb in late 68 and 69 much like their escapades with the 468 which were either disasters or worked great mine was pretty cool. I had a line lock on it and used to have a blast burning off tires. And lets not forget the Chrysler Lean Burn engines which got great mileage but sadly seldom survived. Another thing to consider is that speculators make or lose the money and much of it is from your retirement plans trying to make you money. The big picture is still the same until we as a country learn to live within our means and repair our economy the numbers won't matter. This country has been on a drunken spending binge for decades and it seems to get worse every year. I swear some days it is like who can come up with the dumbest idea. Current US debt per taxpayer is $ 125,954.00 unfunded liability per tax payer is $ 1,012,306.00 so if you pay taxes that is what has been spent or budgeted for you to pay so far, any guess's as to what the new heath care plans will add to that number. There are 311 million people in this country and only 138 million with jobs so that means 56% of the population lives off the remaining 44%. 26 million people are unemployed but the government only counts 15 million as officially unemployed so 11 million people without jobs don't count for various reasons. The cool thing is of the 138 million with jobs only 110 million pay taxes. I really want one of the 28 million non tax paying jobs some days.

Now for the optimist we have been in worse shape and survived but we have to suck it up and accept the fact you can't spend your way out of a spending problem anymore than a alcoholic can drink their way sober.

[Yooperdad]

In my household, it became kind of family tradition over the years to tell another family member "you aren't as dumb as you look" when you wanted to recognize them in a very complimentary way for something they did or said.

1 Maniac, I don't care what the rest say, but in my opinion, "you aren't as dumb as you look"

[JWheeler]

There is a little more to this scenario as well. It as become quite clear that we need to find and produce more oil here on our own turf and quit relying on foreign oil to fuel our needs. Unfortunately no one is giving the green light, too much red tape to get thru crap to start drilling where we know there is oil. This is a big part of the problem, and a great solution. Like mentioned above, we are crawling out of this crappy economy. And these "speculators" predicting gas prices is certainly not going to help anything. The one thing that I see happening will be less disposable income for everyone across the board. Now this will not affect the wealthy as much as it will affect middle and lower class. Simply put, prices go up, spending will go down and dig us right back into another hole. Funny how the mention of drilling from Obama can drop fuel prices significantly, which leads me to wonder exactly how much power these damn speculators have?????

[IRon]

Nobody can predict what's going to happen 5 minutes from now let alone a year. There's an old saying on wall street that says when the taxi driver starts talking about oil prices, it's time to get out. Yeah there's been a big surge in oil prices, mostly by speculators and dollar valuations. It'll bounce around some short term.

But you can speculate all you want, fact is energy has been one of the best investments long term for the last 10 years and will be in the next 10. Short term it's probably run it's course, but long term, unless something changes globally, demand will go up and supply will go down.

So what can you do? Can't do much about gas/oil prices. They're gonna go where there gonna go. Can complain about it, but doesn't do much good, just feel better. Can invest in it and try to make some money off it. Can try to cut personal consumption here and there. Can work some over time to pay for it.