5 bucks a gallon for gas? Expert sees it in 2006

5 bucks a gallon for gas? Expert sees it in 2006

Last night when we were in Iowa City, I was a little bit dismayed that it cost 28 bucks to fill the not-even-empty tank on our Mazda 626. It makes me exceptionally happy that we don't have a gas guzzling SUV and that I'm not filling two gas tanks like we used to be.

This is a little bit frightening. Gas prices are going up, but nobody in the country is doing anything different. I was watching something on one of the Sunday talk shows last weekend that gas prices currently are high enough for people to bitch about it but not high enough to change their driving habits. In other words, it translates into oil companies making money hand over fist.

And the crazy thing is that there's no coverage in the media how gas prices are going to trickle down into every part of the economy. Wal-Mart depends on cheap gas to be able to rape and pillage the countryside, er, I mean offer low prices on consumer goods. How long will they be able to keep that up. And, like it or not, Wal-Mart has become something of a bellwether for the economy.

It'll be interesting to see where this goes. It may just be a blip, but if not, I predict it will expose suburban sprawl for what it is--the worst misallocation of resources in the last century.