Sunday, October 12, 2008

Gas Prices

I don't know what they are in other parts of the country, but around here gas is down to $2.75/gallon and $2.85/gallon for no ethanol. That's over a dollar drop in, what, 3-4 months. When it was around $4/gallon you couldn't watch a newscast without them mentioning it every 5 minutes. And now? Bush seemed to get the lion's share of the blame for $4 gas. Will he get the credit for $2.75 gas?

UPDATE
Monday, October 13
Gas dropped again overnight to $2.65/gallon.

2 comments:

Jules said...

Of course not... he can't possibly have had anything to do with something like that. Inconceivable!!

Sorry about the heavy sarcasm... we haven't even been introduced yet :-)

Isn't it weird how you never hear anything about the "good" anymore? People just seem to gravitate toward the negative and feed off each other. Here's an example I observed just this week...

I have been in a class for this past week. On Thursday and Friday, we were subjected to almost constant stock updates from two of our classmates: its down 100... its down 300... bla bla bla. All day long. First the ticker details... then they would start ranting about this and that situation and what might happen, and so on.

After a nice quiet weekend - no TV, no news - I went back to class on Monday. More lectures about project mgmt, but an otherwise uneventful day. It wasn't until I got home from class and switched on the TV looking for NCIS reruns that I caught a brief newscast about the stock market ending "up" over 900 points. Not one freaking peep from the stock market junkies all day long.

Has it always been this way - this constant focus on how absoultely horrible and hopeless everything is? Is it ever going to stop??

On an unrelated note... are you still sending the Hero emails? I didn't get one this week or last and was wondering.

Unknown said...

fair point about focus on the negative - news services love it, and by extension, popular culture revels in it.
although with the 'constant stock market update' example it's people focusing on the extremes of daily life, and well, the market 'up 900 points' is not anywhere near as rare as some of the recent negative events.
... extreme bad news isn't that hard to find, but news that is proportionally as good is not so common, and most of us can only deal with so many 'fluffy kitten stuck up a tree' stories.

As for the original story, wasn't the link between $4 petrol and bush about an expectation for him and his gov to do something (or to have done something) to fix it (however unrealistic that expectation may be), but now gas prices are falling can bush actually take or receive credit for the result?
It might be absurd to expect pres bush to fix a cost based on high wholesale costs from another country (other than socialist-type solutions such as subsidies, or just threaten to bomb oil producing countries if they don't drop prices), but it's equally absurd to give him a 'pat on the back' when wholesale prices fall.