Wednesday, January 19, 2011

"...but it's a good day...."

Gasoline prices took a big jump yesterday, $3.15/gallon up from $2.79[1] -- for once, the day after I filled up my tank -- and this morning, the Local News had to explain to us proles What It All Meant:
Higher prices at the pump, the man with the microphone said, are the price we pay for a recovering global economy. [2]

Huh.

So, I found myself wondering, they're not the result of pumping zillions of fresh-printed dollars into the "recovering economy" and thereby making each and every one of them worth a bit less? Oooookay.

Bonus point: "Hoosiers will keep on paying for higher fuel prices even away from the pump. More on that 'trickle-down' effect coming up." See, they tolja "trickle-down economics" was baaaad! (And, natch, rubes like us could not possibly grasp that it takes fuel to move, well, everything tangible from point A to point B and we pay for the gas as a part of the price we pay for the tangible item).

Egad.

(Homework for the curious: compare oil prices to gold prices in various currencies. Betcha they track, with gold generally leading).
______________________________________
1. Yes, you pay more. Unless you pay less.
2. Corrected mispelling "prince" to"price".
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10 comments:

  1. Wayne ConradJanuary 19, 2011 at 6:46 AM

    No kidding.

    I'm just a _bit_ fed up with officials telling me that 1 + 1 = 3, so don't worry and go shopping. The only reason the economics of nations is any different than the economics of my household is that I'm not allowed to steal from my neighbor. Even my family would object to that. Otherwise, they are ultimately the same. If I can't sustain ever increasing debt, neither can any nation.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousJanuary 19, 2011 at 8:36 AM

    Even better:

    http://www.randomuseless.info/gasprice/gasprice.html

    Corrected for inflation, the price of gas is fixed except for spikes responding to world events. Correct back to my formative years (the mid-Sixties, when I got out and about on my own) and it's about thirty cents a gallon, which is what I paid then.

    Regards,
    Ric

    ReplyDelete
  3. wolfwalkerJanuary 19, 2011 at 8:43 AM

    ?? Almost forty cents a gallon in a day? Where I am, it took about six weeks to increase that much.

    ReplyDelete
  4. New Jovian ThunderboltJanuary 19, 2011 at 8:49 AM

    But the nice newsman told me inflation was non-existent! Except for stuff people buy.

    ReplyDelete
  5. JoannaJanuary 19, 2011 at 9:09 AM

    I bought eggs yesterday; they were up forty cents from a couple weeks ago. I watch staple food prices more closely than I watch gasoline; they're harder to move, so it takes more pressure to make them go up. Gasoline prices jump if our ambassador to Canada sneezes. Eggs, not so much.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Eck!January 19, 2011 at 10:55 AM

    Gas/oil makes or moves everything so if gas goes up so follows everything. That is how inflation works.

    Travel for many by car may be optional or can be conserved.. However, if you heat with oil and want to keep safely warm you have limited choices if any at all.

    Not good.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Josh KruschkeJanuary 19, 2011 at 11:34 AM

    "Higher prices at the pump, the man with the microphone said, are the prince we pay for a recovering global economy."

    Why do you repeat asinine statements that hurt my brain to process?

    I fear for are nation if this was a sign of what thay call critical thinking and analysis these days.
    :-(

    ReplyDelete
  8. perlhaqrJanuary 19, 2011 at 11:51 AM

    Yeah, I had noticed that the price of the bag of shredded cheese at Smiths had gone up $2 since the last time I had bought one. Actually, since it had been on a $2 off sale the last time I bought one, it was quite a kick in the pants to notice the new price.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Blackwing1January 19, 2011 at 12:09 PM

    For quite a while I've been looking for someone (other than me) to do the basic research on the price of gold ($/oz) and the price of oil ($/barrel), do the conversion to oz. gold/barrel, and do up a nice little graph for the last 50 years.

    Haven't found one on the net...can anybody point to one?

    WV - "fishol"
    "There ain't no inflation..and that's 'fishol."

    ReplyDelete
  10. gregJanuary 19, 2011 at 11:34 PM

    Where I live, in Richland, Washington, prices have been going up on many things for a couple of weeks. The local papers are saying it's because scheduled maintenance has all the locks on the Columbia River closed for a 14-week period, meaning everything that was coming in on the river now has to come in overland.

    I'm very curious to see how fast prices go back down in March when the river opens back up for commercial traffic.

    ReplyDelete

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