I was reading this morning an AP article that said Republicrat presidential hopeful John McCain said he wanted to suspend the 18.4 cent federal tax on unleaded gasoline and the 24.4 cent federal tax on diesel from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Now I’m not going to make this post about how funny I think it is that Mr. Big Gov’t tax you to death McCain all of the sudden has had a change of heart and wants to cut taxes. Please don’t believe him because he hasn’t. But did you notice how much money per gallon the US gov’t is making?  Let’s compare it to the 9.5 cents/gal  the big bad evil oil giant Exxon makes. So why are so many Americans mad at the big oil companies for making huge profits over the last few years? Be mad at your federal government for still paying out $18.5 billion  in subsidies to these companies making billions of dollars a year. They should have to use their own money for further exploration. That is a point Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul brought out in debates earlier this year.

If we look at how the market is reacting to high gas prices, then they should continue to rise. I went to the gas station the other day and every  pump was two deep with people filling up Tahoes, Expeditions, F150’s. Many of which had boats hooked up to them. Now I’m not criticizing anyone for what they drive( I own a Suburban). I just want to know how high the price of gas has to get to force us to start trading in our gas guzzlers for more fuel efficient vehicles? Right now the prices don’t seem to be affecting too many people’s driving habits. “Pay at the pump” has a lot to do with that.

One other quick point(well two) I want to make is our dependency on foreign oil. Right now we produce about 40%  of the oil we consume. The problem is when the media talks about our foreign dependency they appear to blame the Middle East for this. Iran threatens us(really they are just defending themselves against US threats) and gasoline prices go up. Here is a chart showing our top oil importers. You’ll notice that Canada is our largest importer. I haven’t seen anything in the news about Canadian oil supplies being disrupted. Have you? There is a lot more to the story when talking about control of Middle Eastern oil. I’m not going to get into that now.

The last thing to consider is the fact that your dollar is purposely being driven down into nothing. I will go into more detail about this in my next post. So while we all are feeling it at the pump, and none of us are happy about it; please blame the right people. When investigating corruption, manipulation, and where all the money is going it seems like you always wind up in Washington.