KEN-JENNINGS wrote:
I know its not just in the U.S., but I wanted the topic to be US in general, not other countries.
But you can't separate the rising gas prices in the US from international situations that affect world oil prices.
As for the actual pricing here in the US, I would say we have been lucky for a long time. Our prices have been cheap compared to other places in the world. I think it is because of this that we have constantly seen larger, more powerful vehicles, with poor gas mileage, roll out of auto manufacturers for the US market. The time has come that we are going to have to change our thinking about that, not only from an economic standpoint, but a political one as well.
In my opinion we need to remove any tax incentives from oil companies that aren't associated with building additional refining capacity and researching alternative fuel sources; this would also require the Feds to put a leash on the hard core environmentalists. Don't get me wrong, I think use/harvesting of resources needs to be done responsibly, and we can't just allow pollution to rum rampant, but we can't just shut down all resource production and use.
We also need to increase gas guzzler taxes, and offer incentives to auto makers for increasing their mileage and expanding their lines of hybrid and E85 vehicles. The tax incentives also need to be passed along to the buyers of these vehicles; more than they are now. For diesel we need to expand bi-diesel. Right now we have excess farming capacity, and even pay farmers to keep land out of production to artificially keep prices up. We could remove these farm subsidies and have farmers start groing crops to be used for the production of bi-diesel and ethanol for E85 vehicles.