Americans who complain about gas prices.....tell me this please:

Canada pays, these days, about $1 a liter.

A US gallon is about 4 liters. 3.8 or so.

So, we pay $.80 more a gallon than Americans do.

WHY?

Not only am I not sympathetic over the $3/gallon bellyaching, I'm wondering why it's not more there. It should be.

My friend tells me the answer is "taxes". If that's the case then I hope a Democratic President will have the courage to raise gas taxes.

....support services and lower standards and lower..

I'll complain all I want, if and when I do! It's my fucking pocketbook, not yours!

2008 oil 100 dollars a barrel. Sure, I buy that. It is not taxes.

In the pricing category, the "free market" zealots argue for a demand/supply pricing function based on overly simplified market theories. The problem is, of course, that the associated tenets of those theories postulate that increased pricing will result in increased supply - either as a result of existing producers increasing production or additional (more efficient?) producers entering the market. Neither consequence seems likely with a finite supply and both state and private oligopolistic practices. This is, of course, not even seriously foreseen by the "free marketeers" advocating price increases to LIMIT consumption, else the consumption would actually be reduced - and thats the proposed "solution." It should be obvious, then, that those proponents are merely advocating enormous private windfall profits to the current oiligarchs as the world runs out of oil. That's the "profit motive" gone globally sociopathic.

The alternative in the pricing category is taxation. But BOTH approaches in employing pricing to reduce consumption have the same undesirable result: equity. The poorest get hurt first and the wealthy last.

Then comes the "band-aid" - tax credits for everyone ... or based on means. The stated intention is to offset the onerous tax burden on the poorest but it rarely works. Why? Because the correlation between taxes paid for the consumption is loose, at best, to those who file tax returns upon which tax is due - and thus creditable.

The alternative is rationing. That invariably creates a black market. The economic impact of a black market CAN be limited to benefiting only the least wealthy ... but that's statistical, not real. The better approach, in concert with rationing, would be to legitimize a "white market." Messy.

There are no 'perfect' solutions, as far as I can see,

We have two Americas -- the American that can fill its gas tank to the top, and the America that buys $5 of gas at a time, and that is fine with the free market Chicago Boys.

a bicycle. And I don't think I could handle a motorcycle. Our aging population will be a problem on these things.

except Exxon Mobile's bottom line. When people say we need to raise gas prices so people will drive less that always seems to me to be a very New Yorkcentric point of view, as it seems to assume that people drive out of convenience and not out of necessity. Yes perhaps if we hadn't had decades of relatively cheap gas rural development and commuter suburbs wouldn't have developed in the way that they did. But they did. And working people live in those places, and they drive to work. Raising gas prices just takes food off their tables because they can't just stop driving to work. For the foreseeable future they will pay the higher prices and keep driving out of necessity. We need efficiency and alternative fuels in the real world, not higher gas prices for working people.

Which is a big improvement

Just higher prices for those that drive out of necessity and don't have the means to buy a more efficient car or move closer to their jobs. If I live 20 or 30 miles from the factory where I work and there is no public transportation (and there isn't in most places) rising prices won't lead me to consume less. I will drive to work or be unemployed. So guess what, I will drive to work and pay more, not consume less.

Go live in the UK. Higher gas prices specifically engineered to reduce consumption have had nil effect there.

When people have no option but to drive in order to get where and what they need, they will drive. If governments want to reduce consumption, they have to put the work into making mass transit reliable and available to as many as possible. Otherwise, as in the UK, the government just rakes in more tax money...and the people are poorer but still driving. Because they don't have a choice.

for their gasoline, but, all of their roads and bridges and traffic lights etc. are all paid out of the gas tax. We here in the US do not do that. That's why there's a fight all the time over the "highway bill" and earmarks to build bridges, and gripes about how our highway infrastructure falling apart.

I'm not quite sure which way I'd prefer to have it. In a way, the wealthy pay more in gas tax because it's mostly them who drive the big heavy and less fuel efficient cars. The semi's pay a LOT more in road tolls & fuel taxes, but roads deteriorate much faster under their use than with cars only.

If you have the lower taxes per gal. it is less of a burden on people who drive smaller, lighter cars, and mostly drive to and from work.

It's really a tradeoff.

If I were a Brit I could just as easily ask what you're bellyaching about, because they're paying the equivalent of around $9/gallon.

You need to look at a lot more than just gas prices to understand what's going to hurt people in a certain economy and what isn't.

have MUCH better public transportation systems. Outside of major metro areas, there are very few alternatives to driving and a huge reluctance to fund such systems.

Chicago is undergoing major battles to fund their transit system. This makes no sense because the roads are hell driving now during rush hour. What do they think will happen when they throw thousands more into the mix. It's very short-sighted.

Americans love of their cars and SUVS is only matched by their defense of such a flawed health-care system. The GOP has been so successful in its campaign to demonize anything that looks like socialism.