Gas Prices.. falling anywhere?

wow...cheap in Parma. BTW..just read where the Parma Town Mall was sold.

This weekend it was $3.50 something at Rocky Top in Tennessee but rose steadily as we got south on the way home. Saw it as high as $3.79 as we got off the highway.

john

JoeinNY wrote: If you want to blame the losses of 2009 on obama when it was bush that created that situation and signed the budget for that year then yeah obama really screwed us.     I am looking at my 401k happy that it is finally making progress again and thinking there is no way I can afford another republican in office for at least another 4 years.

Joe, Bush signed the budget congress gave him. Obama was in congress and voted for the budget that gave him the problem he inherited.

Your 401k is doing well thanks to QE 1,2,and 3. Its all artificial, we are due to have tha bubble burst, and when the inevitable inflation kicks in from all the funny money we are printing your gains will be more than offset by the loss of your dollars value.

harddock wrote: The fact is when gas prices go up they do it immediately and disporportional to the time and amount they come down. Consumer is always the one getting it up the a$$!

Conservatives call that the free market.. supply and demand, nothing to see here.. move on about your day. There isnt much immediate Obama can do about it with the tea party running congress... but he cant say that in a debate or he will be beat up for blaming someone else.

I call it an unregulated free market, the only possible solutions are additional regulation or a planned economy where the government sets the price. Is that what you want, are you some sort of commie? This is america bend over and salute the flag!

Solution offered by Romney..
we drill more.. we have and as everyone has pointed out it hasnt done anything to help the price.

we should reduce regulations on oil companies... well how did that work out for us - Romney was right that oil production on federal lands fell 14% between 2010 and 2011 (it is way up over the course of the last 4 years but that one year it did fall). That drop is entirely due to the gulf oil spill and the aftermath, so letting them guys take care of themselves hasnt exactly proven to help provide a steady supply of cheap oil


Solution offered by Obama -

we should go after market manipulators - blocked by republican filibuster

we should cut demand by producing cars that use less gas - in progress but is going to take a few years (done without congress)

we should drill more to make sure global supply issues cant cripple us but we should do it safely - in progress (mostly driven by higher oil prices)

we should invest in alternate energy that will further lower demand - kinda in progress - we wasted a bunch of money by starting this but since 2010 we have not followed up and so the industries will die and therefore default on the loans we gave them while the koreans and chinese are getting a head start on the economy of the future.



The problem with romneys solutions of drilling and lowering taxes is that Obama already did them... cause that is the short sighted type of crap americans like and he wanted to get reelected. Romney does propose lowering regulations.. but not the ones that effect the small business man, those are all state and local ones he cant effect, all he can do is turn once again turn loose wall street to use my 401k to line thier pockets.   


Give me slow and steady recovery over voodoo economics anyday.

I am just glad there is only another 20 days of this nonsense!

If you want to blame the losses of 2009 on obama when it was bush that created that situation and signed the budget for that year then yeah obama really screwed us.    

I am looking at my 401k happy that it is finally making progress again and thinking there is no way I can afford another republican in office for at least another 4 years.

2 dollar a gallon gas can only come out of OPEC nations.. the price of having gas prices at that level for years was keeping in power dictators that ruled thier people with an iron fist to keep the place stable enough to provide uninterupped low cost oil. Whether we want to continue living in that world or not the people of the middle east apparrently don't. American simply can't and shouldnt want to win a race to the bottom where the lowest labor costs and lowest gas costs prevail.   

Gas is $3.49 in Menomonee Falls, WI. (That's today 10/17/12) It depends on where you drive. It can be one price at one place and another right across the street. Go figure.

JoeinNY wrote: And no it is not the job of a government office to control the price of a global commodity I am shocked that any conservative would even consider such a thing as being part of the role of government.

Geeeze, imagine this post getting political..

Why then, did Obama, Poloisey, and Hillary use it as a political tool when slamming the "Repub's 2 buck gas" a few years ago?


BTW, $3.76/ gal this morning, back to pre-Issac prices... Lets see, up 30 cents overnight, back down .30 in two months... AND we are HAPPY about it.

........What a great country!

The mission of the Energy Department is to ensure America’s security and prosperity by addressing its energy, environmental and nuclear challenges through transformative science and technology solutions.

There are agencies that deal with manipulation of markets creating artificially high prices.. of course every appointment to those agencies has been filibustered by the republican minority in the house.

The Chinese/europeans/japanese/koreans are winning the clean energy race that will determine the leaders in the world your children will inherit, as much as we want to complain about excessive government spending on wind, solar, batteries, etc and the US companies that have gone bankrupt after recieving grants and loan guarantees in every case they went bankrupt because they were competeting against a much more heavily subsidised (like 10-100 times more)foreign entitiy like the chinese solar cell producers and the korean battery manufacturers.

Either we want to live in world where we use american technology and ingenuity to compete with first world countries on future technologies, or we want to enter into a race with saudi arabia and iran as to who can rape our land of all its natural resources quickest while at the same time destroying the environment as necessary.

Anti wind power propaganda is just that, propaganda. I have yet to see a windmill set a single persons well water on fire, or produce a drop of acid rain. You really have to contort yourself sideways to find a legitimate environmental concern with windmills. It is a long term solution with paybacks that take more than a single generation.. it will need government support to compete against established energy sources that have already had centuries of government support. The us does not want to be behind in that technology. Short term solutions and technologys are the realm of private business.. america has always worked best when the federal government supported long range development.

Truth, you can’t handle the truth! Seriously no he didn’t answer the question cause the answer is yep 3-4 dollars is the normal has been for 6 years except when the economy was in complete free fall.. get used to it. If I was on the stage with a guy who was completely willing to lie and say that the 1.86 a gallon number was realistic and that it was obamas fault and all he had to do was issue more permits and destroy a few nature preserves and that would happen I wouldn’t answer the question either… Except how he did answer, which was to say that yep if Romney destroys the economy to the point where nobody is willing to spend any money on anything just like bush did then yes gas will be $1.86 again.   

And no it is not the job of a government office to control the price of a global commodity I am shocked that any conservative would even consider such a thing as being part of the role of government.

To refresh ones recollection of history I suggest going to the gas buddy site and set the duration to 8 years and click the button that shows oil price along with gas price.

The shortish answer to WTF is that in the short term market oil is both limited and infinite, supply is not controlled by demand but rather opec’s willingness to produce. Gas supply is not infinite due to refinery limitations and is easily manipulated by speculators. Demand for gas is only one part of oil consumption and as we all know demand falls off like a rock at 4 bucks.   At the peak of gas prices (and demand) under gwb there were still additional demands on crude oil price for heating oil, plastics production, power production, etc. Many of those have yet to return due to construction not coming near the bloated bubble levels, but more importantly due to the prevalence of cheap natural gas. The refineries therefore are the primary oil price driver (outside of the 25% tax we all pay to the speculators).   The difference between now and when gas prices peaked in 2008 is that the price to heat our houses over the winter is about half what it was then, plastics prices are considerably cheaper, airline tickets are cheaper, etc.

This does show market inefficiency because the market is driven completely by demand and not by production costs, but it is a tremendously colluded market with many shared resources and no real ability to compete with the established players. We are talking about Oil, and nobody did make that. It was stuff that you end up finding under your feet, or more often than not on public land, treating it like a true product of labor from an economics standpoint is nearly impossible.

We need to realize that the oil in Saudi Arabia basically pumps itself out of the ground and is still profitable to produce at 27 dollars a barrel but all the north American sources are relatively more expensive and without higher oil prices many are not economically viable at all. This is the real reason for the north American oil boom of the last 4 years.. no one just discovered north Dakota or the oil sands, it just became economically viable to produce oil there because of the oil spike in early 2008. Technology has also been a factor but again that technology came about because of investments made when oil prices were high (I remember $145 a barrel and not being able to work in my shop that winter).

Is it a conspiracy to keep gas prices high, I suppose it could be but it if is the refiners and big oil companies are behind it. Certainly there is no government motive to raise them. The type of robust regulation you would need to see actual competition at the drilling and refinining stages of production would likely be counter productive, greater financial regulation is of course needed but blocked by serious lobbying.

There is no point to be scored here from either side.. the true cost of that gallon of gas to the world your children will inhabit is probably closer to the price they pay in Europe than the price we pay here in the us. Gas at the 1.85 levels we saw at the height of the economic crisis encourages manufacturing moving overseas (due to cheap shipping and relative attractiveness of coal production) and US oil production to fall off to the point where we wouldn’t be building any keystone xl or even xs pipelines. It also leads people to buy the cheapest possible refrigerators, air conditioners, furnaces, cars, generators, light bulbs etc.. which tend to be copies of 20 year old american designs shipped over from china or india.   Higher energy prices drive consumers to efficient products produced by the world’s best and brightest, which both helps our manufacturing economy and leaves a better world for our children.

Cheap American natural gas to encourage industry to relocate back to America (and keep home heating costs relatively reasonable) combined with reasonable oil prices (70-90) and gas prices (3-4) put America where it needs to be to build real sustainable growth.    If you want to pay a buck a gallon consider moving to Saudi Arabia. If you want to see a liberal or socialist plan go to europe or japan and see what they are paying.

$3.699 in Minocoqua, WI. It took 11 gallons to get here, but I was pulling a small utility trailer.

3.59 in Richland MI

395 today.

Having been there and done that I'm not going to go out and spend dollars to buy a diesel to save cents so I can take a trip a couple of times a year.
On our trip home from SJRR '11 pulling the Mustang with my 6cyl Jeep going 70mph I got 16.1 mpg and spent 325.93 on gasoline. It would take a long time to recover the initial cost of the upgrade.

Bio diesel or even straight vegetable oil was a hot thing around here in 06/07. Once everyone got finished cleaning out their fuel filters and other stuff I don't know many who will even try to use it. Too much hassle to make it and spend the time to get it right. Natural gas will be the next thing here in TX at least, and that's a few years down the road if you aren't in the middle of the oil patch where you can already do it.

Dropping slowly here, getting easier to find below $3.50.

There is still a large refinery out of commission on the West Coast, and also something on the Gulf Coast which has the speculators exited. The refineries that are running are making as much heating oil, diesel and other things they can sell overseas because the difference in the price of Brent Crude and West TX Intermediate. They can buy WTI and sell it for Brent prices elsewhere. The price at the pump is based more on the Brent price right now than the WTI. The oil coming from South Dakota and Canada is even cheaper than WTI, but due to the lack of infrastructure (Keystone XL and other pipelines that aren't there) the shipping costs are very high.

So what brings the price down? I don't know, but there are actually reasons for it other than because they can.

It's dropped down to $3.80s and $3.90s this week. The State just reported lower receipts for sales tax and a poor outlook for the next quarter due to high gas prices, so it is hurting the economy. Why are prices so high relative to crude prices?