Like most memories of "the good old days" this one is false. Unless your "good old days were in the late 1990's, gas costs about the same in inflation adjusted terms now as it has since the 1920s, a little less than historical average where I live. Back when you could "buy a candy bar for a nickle" and had to walk to school in the snow barefoot, uphill both ways, you also only earned $5,000/year. And by the way, if you move to Oregon or NJ you can get your gas full serve, in fact you don't get a choice in the matter and you'll quickly wish you could get out and pump your own gas!
If you believe that the best days of America were behind you, and therefore in the past, that alone is a definitive commentary on the future of America itself. If there was ever a reason for the current generation to say fuck you to the West and the USA, this is it.
The current generation always says fuck you to the past. If you are young, look around you, these are the days someday you will want to return to. I never said they were the best, merely great.
Nice chart Sig, but gasoline costs are hardly the driver of a family budget. Here is where the issues lie. Wages compared to your big cost drivers-housing-cars-college-health insurance. http://www.mybudget360.com/cost-of-living-2014-inflation-1950-vs-2014-data-housing-cars-college/
Never said they were. I was directly responding to a post about back in the day when you allegedly could "go to the (full serve) station and hand them a dollar and tell them to give me a pack of Camels and put the rest in the tank like I did everyday after school when America was great" and that we needed to drive the current oil oversupply until that happened again. I was simply pointing out that we're already there (absent the Camel part, pretty sure they are far more expensive than in the "good old days"!). Really I'm waiting for an answer on why it even remotely makes sense to sink 45,000 jobs worth of effort into an industry that is already oversupplied and has no significant increase in demand on the horizon. My feeble attempt to encourage critical thinking skills.
While I agree with you politically, my dad worked in the chemical industry. To compete with china and Saudi Arabia on chemical feedstocks (like ethane) the US needs more refining capacity. Shale has lowered the cost of energy but we don't have enough capacity to convert nat gas into ethane, etc. competitively. That's the rationale for the refineries. They started the plans 3 years ago and refineries are built for like a 50year horizon.
Again we don't anticipate needing substantially more ethane, for example, tomorrow or even in 30 years. We have plenty of capacity to create what we need now and in the future. I know a bit about ethane as well, and the Saudi price advantage comes pretty much exclusively from their feed stock price, not some super efficient new refineries, just like they have a price advantage in any petrochemical endeavor by virtue of having the cheapest to extract petroleum. After sinking 45,000 jobs into new refineries, the U.S. will be in no better position to compete with the Saudi's in that particular endeavor. They will have a glut of refining capacity, that's all.