Gas prices played key role in financial collapse

The current recession is incessantly, almost mantra-like in the media, blamed upon greedy Wall Street executives and the popping of the housing bubble causing in turn the collapse of financial institutions across the land.

But no one seems to speak of the first of the dominoes, gasoline prices. From March 2007 to July 2008, the pump price of gasoline, diesel and more increased by nearly $2 per gallon. At an average consumption of 815 million gallons/day, American consumers had to dig deep for an extra $50 billion last July alone.

Families struggling to make the gas credit card payments were certainly not in any position to have fun buying new cars, a house, or even dinners out.

So the first domino tilted into the next. Fuel prices have subsided for the moment, but all that money is gone, much of it to overseas oil producers.

In all of the blathering in Congress about fixing the causes of the recession, I have heard not a word about increasing oil production and refining via removing the impossible congressional hurdles toward those ends.

As gas prices now rise again, this congressionally-sponsored burden marches on.

TERRY LAMB

Sagle