This isn’t another thread complaining about the high price of gas. This is a thread complaining about the insane rubberbanding that gas prices are doing now. Back in the day gas prices would go up or down 5-10 a gallon and the prices would change every week or two.
Nowadays the fucking gas prices change on a daily basis. I’ve seen them go up as much as 20 cents a gallon in one day, then 2 days later drop 25, then the next day back up 20 cents. They change so dramatically now. It’s fucking ridiculous. I feel like if I am getting close to empty I need to fill up if I see the pump says 225 a a gallon on Mon night because it may say 250 a gallon on Tuesday.
This isn’t an exaggeration either. At least in Dayton Ohio.
Prices have been all over the place in my neck of the woods since mid January when they hovered around $1.95.9 for a while. Now it’s back up to freakin’ $2.37.9! And you’re right. The prices are changing daily, and wildly. How does one justify $2.25.9 one day and $2.37.9 the next? …and not at just one station.
And the funny thing is how much a state legislature will agonize over a proposal to raise the gas tax by 1/2 cent per gallon. With daily swings 40 times that, who cares?
Because the tax will never be lifted, unlike temporary price upswings, they may actually come back down. The tax is forever.
1/2 cent per gallon would cost me about $130 per year.
What doesn’t make sense with the wild price fluctuations is how the price can change on one batch of gas.
Lets assume a tanker truck filled up a gas station with gasoline that was refined when oil was $50 a barrell and the retail price was $2.25 gallon. How can the station raise the price of that gas based on the price of oil after the original refining?
Ah, but those same lawmakers will argue that it’s a tax on those who can least afford it ((or a tax on the poor)kind of like cigarette taxes, booze tax, and the lottery), if it was proposed by the ‘other party’.
I’m just sick of getting taxed here. WI is one of the highest taxed States in the US and we’re getting 1/2 cent taxed to death here.
We should start seeing 1/2 cent tax reductions if you ask me. When most taxes are implemented there’s talk of it only being temporary, or untill we reach such and such goal(s). Bullshit, it’s just another con job on the honest citizens of this State! That’s another reason I’m against it.
They claim they have to raise the price to be able to afford the next delivery.
If some did it backwards they’d have no costumers as all the other stations would have adjusted their prices earlier to compensate for the higher expected costs.
Then you’d have the lone holdout at $3.00/gal trying to make up for the higher prices while everone else is back down to $2.50/gal cause they made their money last month.
It’s just the way they do it, in other words.
It’s like any other commodity, copper, oranges, gold, etc…if it goes up on the trading block it goes up for the consumer too.
According to the local talking heads on some news show, the high prices now are the result of a change from “Winter gas” to “Summer gas”. Apparently there are different additives for winter driving. According to the report the changeover can cause inventory shortages which cause the prices to increase temporarily.
Or there’s my theory that every time there’s even the slightest hint of an excuse (stock market swings, Middle East unrest, rainy weather) the oil companies start raising the price of gas. They stop when it becomes newsworthy and trot out a canned response and reassurances that this is a temporary thing. A few months later, thay announce their latest all-time record quarterly profits.
I won’t feed the notion that any criticism of the oil industry screwing over the general public with a razor-wired telephone pole with their pricing policies is unpatriotic, unamerican, communist, fluoridated, and/or mindlessly conspiritorial.
I will say that I personally saw regular gasoline jump in price from 7AM to 6PM last Friday 9 cents a gallon at all 8 of the gas stations that I commute past.
And if you listen to some taxpayers who are being "just 25 cents a week"ed to the point where nearly half of our income goes toward some form of tax, you can understand my outrage when I hear lawmakers make statements like this.
Uncommon Sense puts the rest of my rage into words better than I can.
