When Smirk entered the White House in 2001, the price of gasoline was bumping around the $1.80 mark.  Crude was bumping around the $30 a barrel mark.  You can’t blame that jackass and his idiot henchmen for all of the increase, but his splendid little war is one factor exacerbating it.  The other is actually more Reagan’s fault then Bush’s.  Reagan began the financial deregulation process that led straight to the sub prime mortgage meltdown we have now, and the resulting credit crunch.  Investors, worried that all of a sudden real estate isn’t the safe haven for money it used to be, are putting their dough into buying commodities like…er…crude oil…which drives up the price.

Why it is that people assume republicans are better at managing an economy then democrats is beyond me, other then I guess people think that if you’re rich you must know how to make money.  Some rich people do.  Some rich people absolutely love to make money.  And those people rise the standard of living for everyone.  Their energy makes the world a better place.  But others are rich because they merely hunger for wealth and they don’t care how they get it.  The ones of low ambition turn to petty crime.  The really ambitious ones build empires, corrupt governments, and legally rape everyone and everything around them blind.  Guess which sort gravitate to the republican party.

Anyway…I was just reading this over at Eschaton…

After more than five years of petroleum price increases, American consumers appear to be expecting the worst. A CNN poll taken last week showed that 59 percent of Americans believe it is very likely that they will pay $5 a gallon for gasoline before the end of the year and that an additional 27 percent say it is somewhat likely.

Economists say these expectations make it more probable that people will change behavior rather than simply wait for a turn in the traditional up-and-down cycle of commodity prices. "People now realize that prices may come back down, but they’re not going down to where they were," said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com. "We’re going to have to live with higher energy prices for a while. And that’s affecting their behavior and what they buy and don’t buy."

For Rusty Davis, a handyman from Arlington, the high cost of gasoline is changing the way he runs his business. He has started to refuse jobs outside the county. When he does travel to jobs, he now takes his fuel-efficient car and leaves behind his work van, which gets only 12 miles to the gallon. He also used to do free estimates in person. Now he does them over the phone.

My brother does that kind of work for a living, and when I read that I thought of him.  He doesn’t do estimates over the phone for the obvious reason that you need to see the situation you’re getting into before you bid on it if you don’t want any unpleasant surprises gulping down your profit margin.  I would expect he just adds in the higher cost of gas to his bids now, if he has to go far afield.  But much of his work is local so I doubt he drives very far, very often to a job.  But I don’t think he’d turn down a job outright simply because it involved driving a distance.  The thing to do is bid it for what it will cost you and if you don’t get it…well…you can’t work a job that’s going to cost you more then you make back from it.

My brother has a big Ford truck, but he also has a smaller one he can use when he doesn’t need the capacity of the big one.  I expect that one’s getting a lot more use now.  I remember when all those air foils started appearing on tractor-trailer rigs back in the late 70s and 80s.  Before the first oil embargo it didn’t matter how much fuel one of those things burned because it was so cheap, and the profile of most of those big rigs was like a fist going down the highway.  Then suddenly the truckers were having to find ways to squeeze out every little bit of milage they could and there was a new appreciation for air drag.  Now you see them all the time on the big trucks.  Something else I’m starting to see more of on American highways are the mid-sized and smaller European trucks and vans.

More fuel efficient automobiles will come and that’s a good thing, but if you really want to keep the cost of living down, investing in more fuel efficient trucks will do a lot more for the economy.