Candidates for high office promise things. All they really have to sell are their personalities and their promises; their past performance is not really any substantial guarantee of future results and pretty much everyone understands that. So here’s a politician offering something substantial and tangible — gas for less than two dollars a gallon, at the level it was at just before Obaam was elected President. She doesn’t say how she’s going to get this delivered; presumably by opening up drilling all over the place, maybe by banning excise taxes?
As Doug Mataconis points out, the reason gas was under two dollars a gallon when Obama took office was that the financial markets had just collapsed. Gas had formerly reached its historic peak price; indeed it was as expensive in inflation-adjusted dollars as it had been during the oil shocks of the 1970’s. And yes, it’s creeping back up to those prices.
All the same, it ought to be obvious that no President has the ability to deliver low retail prices for gasoline, or even create the market conditions in which such things are possible. I suppose some people will buy it all the same, though.
Sheesh. Even I’m old enough to remember when you could get it for less than one dollar a gallon.
Ah Burt, you’re just a pup! /I/ remember well when it was only a Quarter! AND they filled it up for you! And they gave you glassware if you kept going back often enough! And they checked the oil and the tires! And it had lead ethyl (actually tetra ethyl lead). There are other things I no doubt don’t remember but those were the days, sort of.
As for presidents affecting oil prices. Bush gave a speech on the Rose Lawn where he talked about opening the country up for more drilling and tapping the oil shale in the Rockies the oil price immediately came down IIRC. When Obama cancelled all the offshore leases and BLM became BOEMRE and the moratorium became the slowatorium. The price for oil is a mixture of present and futures. If as at the Oil Drum everyone is singing doom and gloom songs, the price goes up – indefinitely. Conversely, new supply from reliable sources means the future isn’t quite so bleak, and prices come down. Demand destruction is another element, but even though that gets trotted out often enough, the import picture in the US hasn’t changed much and China continuously imports ever more regardless of price (after all, they are sitting on over a $trillion of our money that isn’t much good otherwise).
There are other things I no doubt don’t remember
That’s why they got rid of the tetra ethly lead. 🙂
Gas was less than a buck a gallon in many places during the second half of the Clinton administration so it wasn’t *that* long ago. (When I drove cross country for my first job after college, I drove through Death Valley, and it was the then gouging price of $1.99 / gal to fill up before hitting the park)
tetra ethyl lead
That term beings back memories: my Dad was a chemical engineer, and whenever the subject of leaded gas came up, he’d remind us that TEL was used to increase the octane number. (And when we couldn’t get the ketchup out of the bottle, he’d tell us it was thixotropic.)
Thanks, dad! That’s very helpful.
I remember when comic books were a quarter.
I remember when cigarettes were cheaper than comic books.
I remember when a man could make enough to support a family, buy a house, a car and send his kids to college without loans. He could do this without having a 140 IQ, six years of college and owing one hundred thousand in loans upon graduation. And he could do all this without his wife having to work.
It helped that every other industrialized nation on earth was largely buried in rubble at the time.
In the 1970s?
It also helped that union membership was around 30 percent, and taxes on the wealthy were reasonable.
Really? They were? In the 1940’s and 1950’s, marginal taxes on the ultra-rich were staggeringly high. Of course, you were talking about a man supporting a family on a single income in a middle-class sort of lifestyle. My own research shows that taxes on those sorts of people have been functionally constant since the 1986 tax reform act.
Two things: I haven’t made the equivalent of 60 thousand since the oil crash in 82 so I don’t worry about that. The other thing is, and this should scare the shit out of the wealthy, I care as much about them as they do me.