What I find interesting is that when I was a kid serving in the U.S. Navy gasoline in the U.K. was selling for about $5 a gallon. That was in 1958. Nearly all of the price was a ridiculous tax imposed on fuel. At the the time, gasoline in the U.S. sold for about .25 cents per gallon, mainly because taxes were very low on fuel. Heating oil sold for less than 8 cents per gallon, again because there were essentially no taxes imposed. Leap forward to 2011, gasoline in the U.K. has nearly doubled in just over a half-century, an increase of nearly 90-percent. In contrast, the price of gasoline in the U.S. has gone up 1,600-percent during the same period. And, the cost of home heating fuel has skyrocketed by more than 2,000-percent.
In the U.S. you need a car to go the grocery store, while most of the places I visited in the U.K. had grocery stores withing a short walk of nearly every home. My children never walked to school--they took the school bus. The closest elementary (primary) school was 6 miles from my home. The closest high school is 10 miles away. The bus stop where the school bus picked them up is a mile from my front door, which was fine on a warm, dry day. When it's cold and pouring rain, that's not a fun walk.
I just saw a startling statistic about the comparison of wilderness areas of the U.S. to those in Africa--the U.S. has far more open space than Africa. That one blew my mind. Consequently, in order to go anywhere in U.S., even when you live in a major city, you need a car to get there--especially when you get old. Sure, you could bicycle your way to the grocery store, pick up a gallon of milk, some canned goods and a loaf of bread, and with luck, if you left right after breakfast you may even get home before supper-time. Keep in mind, though, in rural America there are very few roads that have a bike path or sufficiently wide shoulder to ride upon. Consequently, you have to share the road with trucks, buses, cars and all of them seem to be in some sort of hurry to get somewhere important.
When gasoline prices skyrocket, the cost of everything quickly follows suit. Food, clothing, everything takes a hit. Then, some idiot in government thinks they should jack up our taxes on everything because the cost of running the government has increased, which they attribute to the rising cost of fuel. It's a Catch 22 situation that, unfortunately for the general public, will continue until long after we are all dead and buried.
Every time fuel prices rise I begin getting stupid emails claiming that if you want to see the price of gasoline fall, just do not purchase gasoline from the largest oil company--Exxon/Mobil. What a joke. Even if you boycotted every Exxon/Mobile gas station in the nation it would have little or no effect on their overall sales. All oil companies sell to each other. The gasoline you pump into your car may have be coming out of a Texaco pump, but what is in their underground tanks came from a bulk plant that buys from everyone. One day it may come from Sun Oil Company, the next day it may be from Texaco, Exxon/Mobil, Shell, you name it.
Damned I'm glad I bought a sailboat,
Gary
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