A regular reader asks if I can post a chart of gasoline prices over my lifetime. Of course. In fact, I can do better:
I was born right in the middle of that warm postwar summer of ever-declining gasoline prices—which ended abruptly in 1973 with the first oil embargo. And then again in 1979 with the second oil embargo. And again in 2002-08 during the Iraq War. And again in 2011 because of turmoil in the Middle East. And then finally yet again in 2022 thanks to the Ukraine War.
Will gasoline ever get down to $2 again? Probably not. OPEC countries need a higher price than that to avoid bankruptcy. But it will probably recede to $3 one of these days.
Heh, I'm of the same era. I remember making a video about how to navigate the license plate system in the late 70's. It included instructions about how to siphon gas from a neighbor's car. Also, how to avoid getting a mouth full of gas or an ass full of rock salt.
These are things one must learn to survive in a capitalist society. I hope your progeny learned well, we'll need as many survivalists as possible for the coming future!
Back in college in the late sixties I used to pull in a get a dollars worth of gas (about 3 gallons worth). A fill up was closer to $3. Today a full charge for my electric car costs about $5.00.
Adjusted for inflation?
Yup
How far does your electric vehicle go on a charge? I have a plug-in hybrid, and I get 25-33 (weather, route, etc) on one charge and then go gas. Fortunately my commute is only 10 miles so most of my driving is electric.
Make me feel good. 😉 In theory, I get ~200 miles on a charge. Still, driving to work and back, which takes about an hour, uses 20% of my battery.
Pretty much any EV you can buy right now will go 200+ miles on a 100% charge. Our ID4 will go 200 on an 80% charge which is pretty typical. The entire range "argument" is pretty silly as most trips are short like yours. We are still on VW's 3 years of free electrons at Electrify America, part of their penance for the diesel debacle, and I will say that you have to wait a lot longer to get a charging station right now as the number of new EV's in Northern California seems to be expanding much faster than charging stations. However, were it not for the free electrons we would always charge at home anyway.
You should put a little arrow pointing out where OPEC declared its first production cut, 1973. Before then, relatively stable prices; after they found out what production cuts could do to prices, much wilder fluctuating highs.
Gasoline was at $2 for 15 years. Why do OPEC countries now need a higher price to avoid bankruptcy?
One of my earlier memories is of my dad cruising up and down the Strip in white-knuckled fury while the rest of the family was rigid and silent with fear: He'd be goddamned if he was going to pay $0.35/gal for gas.
I remember gasoline costing 31 cents per gallon. Of course, my wages at that time were $0.60/hr, but then, I was too young at age 15 to be covered by minimum wage laws.
Now, gasoline is under $4/gallon, and I earn more than $8/hr. Life is good and is getting better all the time.
Oh, and food. Did I mention food? Food was incredibly expensive. When McD came to town, they sold hamburgers for fifteen cents apiece. My mother refused to buy them, saying she could make better hamburgers herself for that price.
My family had a dinner in a Howard Johnson's restaurant once a year, to celebrate something, I can't remember what. We never ate out, and now, I can't afford to cook things myself. The prep time costs more than a meal out.
Thanks for this. I see comment after comment, thread after thread, that life is so terrible, things are so expensive, we can't possible survive, "I'm drowning," etc.
I'm not saying that there aren't people struggling. But things aren't worse for more than ever before.
Conservatives: Everybody's a Nazi except the Nazis, and everybody's a pedophile except the pedophiles.
Conservatism is the ideology of bad people. Can they make it more clear? They've been telling us nothing else for centuries.
Now compare with MPG, or cost per mile (fuel charges).
Even with the push for bigger vehicles, the Republicans trying to weaken fleet average requirements, mileage today is better, from 16 mpg in 1980 to 23.5 in 2010.
https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/showtext.php?t=pTB0208
In the late 90s it was under 1$ where I live. Part of the reason I hate the right so much is I remember the good times just enough to know what we've lost.
Reagan, GW Bush, and Donald Trump have all been enormously consequential presidents, though in an entirely negative way. Their presidencies produced nothing at all of any value and created incalculable harm.
Great as Obama and Biden have been, and Biden is the positively consequential president since Johnson, their legacies, so far, pale beside the worthlessness of the alternatives.
And that's because Democrats are incapable of addressing the elephant in the room.
Can you find equivalent data for the price of gas in Los Angeles?
I suspect that has shown more dramatic rises in the past few years, starting maybe around early 70s and environmental concerns, and I don't know if that (via "the media") has driven the perception of the past 30 years that gasoline is always at an all-time high?
'The real victim here' dismembers girlfriend,
https://www.rawstory.com/me-too-victim-trump/
The big question is how high will it go next August as the Saudis make drastic production cuts in order to help Trump's reelection bid.
When I wuz a kid (say the '60's, I was born in '47) in Louisville, KY, gas was in the high 20s to low 30s...cents. Of course, at the same time, a Chevy was $2K, a Buick $3K, a Caddy $5K and you could fill up a grocery cart with $25.
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I've used the same argument with gas prices, postage stamps and several other items people regularly express price nostalgia for. If you adjust for inflation, the answer is almost always "nothing has happened".
That said, I finally realized something that seems important, but that I don't quite how to use. Over a sufficiently long time frame (30 years is enough, 50 years is definitely enough), the price of pretty much EVERYTHING has to increase at about the inflation rate. While there are always highs and lows to make up the CPI average, any good that is consistently above or below the average will become very conspicuous, after which "something" will happen. Goods lagging CPI will become so cheap that they will become nearly free, which the market will read as "not worth producing". Good consistently leading CPI will become very expensive, indeed, which will likely invite either market or government intervention. (See for this, Healthcare costs, which increased at a rate greater than CPI for 10 to 20 years, but, in doing so, attracted a LOT of cost control mechanisms. My recollection is that over the last 10 years or so, healthcare has been much closer to CPI.
I'd be very curious to see a list of the couple outliers. Has anything at all stayed on the Index for 50 years, while consistently exceeding or trailing CPI by, say, as much as an average of 0.5%/year?
Trump may not be the smartest man when it comes to geopolitics and finance but he understands this: End the war in Ukraine and gas prices and food prices will come down. How much? Hard to say but if it's in the Saudis and Russians best interest to have Trump in office, then they can and will flood the market with oil (at least to where they can still make money) if and when the war ends and the sanctions come off.
Thus Trump's simple, 24-hr plan to end the war: cut off weapon sales to Ukraine, force them to capitulate. You don't have to be a brilliant man to figure it out because certainly he isn't.
There are several neocons (although one doubts if they're conservative anymore) who want Biden to give a televised, Oval Office speech on Ukraine. I wondered what difference it would make but I now see their point: if Biden can explain why prices are up due to the war, why the war in Ukraine is a sacrifice that Americans need to see through to victory for Ukraine and how the U.S. is tied into it, then perhaps improve his poll numbers elsewhere because it all ties in. I think it's time for the Administration to start seeing this and act accordingly in terms of weapons sales and actions taken to help the Ukrainians.