by Luke Rasmussen

Created on: May 30, 2008

Gas prices, have been on everyone's mind since 2000. The new century came, and along with it came pain at the pump.

Which is funny, because I remember in 1998 paying, 79 cents a gallon at one point. Recently, the StarTribune in Minneapolis published a list of rising gas prices over the last seven years. Incidentally, the same amount of time as Bush's run in the White House.

First, let's state the obvious. You have speculators on Wall Street saying, "$150 a barrel by the end of the summer." Others say, "$200 a barrel by the end of the year." This is partly the problem. The "experts" are, for want of a better word, pushing the price up. Funny, don't the "economic experts" pay $4.00 a gallon too?

Then, there's the US dollar which has lost an incredible amount of clout as of late. It's losing against the Euro and the Yen predominantly. And, because oil is priced in US dollars, and if the dollar is losing its financial footing, currencies in other countries don't have to pay as much. We're the ones that have to pay to make up the difference.

Everybody says that geopolitical tensions are to blame alot. Come off it. There have been geopolitical tensions in the world since Adam and Eve created the first geopolitical tension. I do not buy the notion that geopolitical tensions are a primary cause of the rise in oil, and subsequently, gas prices.

There is another problem. Refinery capacity, at least this is what some of the experts tell us, is not increasing. Some are offline for either maintenance, or as was the case in 2005, a major hurricane. Everybody thought that the $3.00 a gallon national average after Katrina was bad. Honestly, I wouldn't mind paying 3 bucks a gallon right now.

Congress is exploring possible price gouging. God bless them if they find out that is what's going on.

And, let's look at our three presidential candidates. It seems to me, that all three of them have ways that would push gas prices even HIGHER. Hillary, for example, wants to tax the oil company profits. Bad idea. You tax them more, they will make us pay more, to recoup their losses. Gas prices will go up.

Barack Obama. Well, he feels that if he goes over and "talks" to the folks in Iraq, the war will magically come to an end. Great. Bush went over and "talked" to the people in Saudi Arabia about high gas prices. All he got, in a figurative sense, was a middle finger pointed at him and a "thank you very much for coming."

And, then there's John McCain. He boasts that economic policy is not his area

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