Re: No one is being taken advantage of

Nobody likes paying what they perceive as too much for a commodity that they perceive as essential.

However there is not really much that anybody could about the price of gasoline, because, short of a major recession, it is inexorably going to rise until the economy switches over to something else.

The reason the price is going up, is the simple law of supply and demand.

Demand is rising as India, China and South East Asian countries industralize

Supply is constant, and in the long-run is bound to fall. The reason is two-fold,

(1) the amount of oil that oil companies thought they had, was vastly overestimated, if you hadn't noticed there have been many news reports about write-downs of this time because the oil companies overestimated reserves

And more fundamentally, (2) Since the early 80s, more oil has been used every-year than new oil has been found.

Or, to put it really simply, we want more and more, but have less and less.

Of course short-term factors can help or worsen the situation, but only in the short-term.

For example, if Iraq's oil were to come fully back into the world market, it might help with the price for a while, or if the tensions in the Middle East (because of the Iran situation) were lessened, it would reduce the price in the short-term, but whatever happens the price will go up in the long-run.

The idea that somebody is gouging you for gasoline money is simply false.

The oil companies are doing okay at the moment, but their margins aren't enormous.

The government gets taxes on gasoline, but in the USA the taxes are very light compared to most Western countries (and if the government takes the taxes off gasoline, they have to get the tax revenue somewhere else, so don't assume you'd be better off),

The OPEC countries don't control the market in oil anymore.

The only good news that I've got, is that as the price of crude rises, it becomes possible to exploit additional oil resources that would have been previously uneconomic to exploit. Additionally, as the price of oil rises, it becomes economic (or politically acceptable) for many oil users to switch to other sources of energy supply. These both can act to reduce the upwards pressure on prices.

So to summarize, the best you can hope for is some short-term relief on prices, if the world circumstances go right, but in the long-run the price is going up, and its going to go up a lot higher than it is now.

We need to start getting our energy from somewhere other than oil. Eventually we will, because the economics will make us switch to nuclear, geothermal, tidal or whatever (the electricity from these can be used to make hydrogen to burn, or to charge batteries). But the switch over is going to be very painful.