"Empathy" from The Ryskind Sketchbook.
Which reminds me to post this column on who's really responsible for high gas prices. Informative, funny, and takes a poke at Mr. Know-It-All to boot.
In the three years in question [crude oil prices] have gone from about $0.70 per gallon to $1.34 per gallon -- a 91% increase. Perhaps the rise in crude oil prices was an underreported story, and thus missed by Mr. O’Reilly? Together with the increased costs of refining by Congressional committee, the increase in crude oil prices totally explains the price of gasoline, without the need to examine if Exxon had a second shooter on the grassy knoll.
Not to mention:
To ease the Katrina price crisis, the government suspended all sorts of very important and wise rules telling the petrochemical engineers that run the refineries how to best make gasoline. The price then dropped suddenly, proving that regulation does not affect cost much. But now the rules are back in place. And the government added some new ones. Most fuel in the U.S. must now contain ethanol, which is expensive, cannot be transported in pipelines and is a pain in the barrel to work with. So costs have gone back up, and then up some more.
Plus there are some dastardly conspirators at work, such as:
The Chinese. This is an insidious plot of 1.3 billion people who are tired of living in huts, eating dirt and riding bicycles. They have demonically entered the world economy in a major way and earned so-called “money,” with which they have bought so-called “motor vehicles.” This has driven up the paper price of oil. The “Indians” are also involved in a similar plot.
Not to mention Hugo Chavez, environmentalists and let's not forget:
Congress. This is a conspiracy composed of a race of supermen who know everything. They know who you should hire, how much water a toilet should use, and where roads or yodeling museums need to be. They know how much you should earn, how much sugar belongs in ketchup and what the fuel of the future will turn out to be. They know how to make baseball better, schools smarter, bread yummier, and democracy more stable. They know what seeds to plant and cows to milk and trees to cut and businesses to smile upon. They know how much high gas prices hurt working families, how big those families should be, and how many hours they should work. They know everything -- including how you should really make gasoline. Such knowledge is not cheap and thus drives up the price of gasoline, at least on so-called paper.
