Wednesday, February 15, 2012

When I was a kid....

Like it or not, these are future old people's good ol' days. There's a ten year old right now clicking away on his XBOX who is going to be fifty-something and loooooong for those halcyon days of yesteryear when that crappy little box amused children before time travel was perfected and his grandson could now simply think of a time in history and any warring armies he chose could be transported to his backyard for live-action battle.

Jimmy! DO NOT have The War Of The Roses in the living room! I am NOT cleaning up all that blood again! Take it OUTSIDE!

Of course, we all want to be ten years old again. Children of The Great Depression have been known to look back on that time with fond remembrance. It was most likely a time when you had nothing but, neither did your neighbor. You probably thought everyone had nothing as there was no television to show you what you were missing. If you are poor today, you probably still have a TV and are aware that there are Kardashians amongst us. You probably hate them. They surely take all that hate to the bank.

A ten year old of any era lives in a small, ten year old world where gas prices don't matter. That's for grown-ups to worry about. If you're a grown-up though, and you can't grasp that everything was cheaper when you were a kid and that nothing will ever be that cheap again then, WELCOME TO THE GOP! Everything you need to know about economics can be learned watching Fox *news*.

Things were cheaper under GW Bush. We need to get someone like him back into the White House so that things can be cheaper again. Its that simply folks! What part of Barack Obama is a not-so-secret Muslim do you NOT understand?

In the threads I regularly read that gas was $2 a gallon when Bush left office. I guess in some parts of the country it was. It was up and down during his eight year reign of terror and I will be the first to tell you that he had nothing (much) to do about that. Presidents, despite former presidential wannabe Michele Bachman's promises, do not set the price of a gallon of gasoline. Republicans secretly know this and this is why they did not support her recent effort to become president. Well, OK, they don't like her either was probably the biggest reason. The prospect of a gay first lady was a bit too FDR/Eleanor to them and they just couldn't see Marcus Bachmann as the man behind the woman.

But, ya know, gasoline was 17 cents a gallon in 1933, at the height of the depression, when FDR was president. Why stop at $2 when you could set your sights on that? If you want a guy who is still around, how 'bout Jimmy Carter and 70 cents a gallon? Even more recently, Bill Clinton, at $1.11 at gallon! Alert readers might notice these figures are lower than $2 and that those are all democrat presidents. In 1970, while Richard Nixon was president, gas was 36 cents a gallon. Do you want him back?

At any price per gallon, we still had millionaires. I cite the Clampett's of Beverly Hills (formerly of Arkansas) of my childhood as an example. Despite what you may hear, there is NO shortage of millionaires in this country. There are a bunch. Many more have gone on to be billionaires, Some of those billionares are oil men. According to my calculations, you make more money charging more for your product than you did when you charged less. Do the math yourself. No one at Exxon or BP wants to sell gasoline at two dollars a gallon. They do better at twice that price. No one at Exxon wants electric powered cars either. Simply, you can't drill for electricity. You could make money on it but, it's not a finite source of energy that you can easily manipulate the price of like oil is. We're always running out of oil until we find new, vast quantities of it that are on our property, not some America hating Arabs land. If only we could drill baby drill in Alaska.... Just a few years ago the tar sands in Canada were not cost effective to extract and ship off to China. Now, in GOP circles, it is cost effective. Not only that, helping our Canadian friends move all that high-dollar oil through a pipeline that crosses American rivers and aquafiers so that oil can be refined and sold on other continents is an American thing to do! Imagine that.

Ya know, if our future ten year olds are teleporting ancient soldiers to fight battles in their backyards, I sure as hell hope their parents are not still driving to work in SUV's powered by $20 a gallon gasoline because its the patriotic thing to do....

But, that's my 20th century logic speaking. look at my avatar. What does that kid know?

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