I'm Full Of Gas

As difficult as it is to believe, it was my pleasure filing up my gas tank today. It truly was. My car gets about 20 miles per gallon, has an 18-gallon fuel tank and requires premium gasoline (so they tell me). So just a few months ago, when premium gas was more than $4 per gallon, it cost me more than $70 to fill up the tank. Today it only set me back $31.30. It was a weird feeling to see such a small number on the pump screen.

With oil prices continuing to drop, there are predictions that we’ll be paying less than $1 per gallon in the not so distant future. All this is good news to everyone except to two classes of people; loudmouth politicians who still don’t understand that commodity prices fluctuate and those people whose entire economy is based on petrol-dollars.

There are some concerns for such a sudden drop in oil prices. The oil producing countries are by-and-large populated by people on the fringe between sanity and blowing up Western cities and the only thing keeping them in line is the gift of their share of the oil revenue. Since our gain is there loss, we probably ought to be switching colors on our threat codes soon. And, really, I would be thinking about this problem more and worrying about the cost to oil producing countries and the loss in oil companies’ revenue if I just wasn’t so happy thinking about that much smaller number that was charged to my gas card today. Please pass along my regrets to the Sheiks and stockholders of Exxon-Mobil.