Wednesday, May 30, 2001
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Wednesday, May 30, 2001 |
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Gas crisis dredges up painful memories By DAVE HAMRICK How well do I remember the gas lines and the rationing during the energy crisis of the '70s. I was struggling financially back then, supporting a family of four on a small town editor's salary. When a fill-up went from $5 to $15, it hit me hard in the pocketbook. My monthly gasoline bill was now taking about a fourth of my income. But that was the tip of the iceberg. Everybody that made anything or sold anything also had to buy gasoline and other petroleum products. Everything from a loaf of bread to a bar of soap shot up in price, interest rates rocketed up to the low 20s, and suddenly I found myself, just like millions of others, no longer struggling to stay afloat financially. The struggle was over, and I was dead in the water. We paid the mortgage and bought food, period. At the grocery store, the only consideration was finding the lowest price, and buying the cheapest kinds of food. Luckily, I like rice. We didn't drive to the other side of town to see relatives. We certainly didn't eat out. We got rid of the '71 Ford Maverick that was costing a whopping $79 a month and my dad helped me rebuild the engine in a '65 Comet that he had given us some time earlier. My wife sat at home, all day, every day, with nothing to do but look after the kids and wait for me to come home, since she had no transportation and no way to pay for gas anyway. And somewhere in the genetic and cultural soup that constitutes my personality, there was the irrational idea that if I just worked hard enough and long enough, somehow I would be rewarded. An 85-hour work week became standard. I did get a $10 a week raise a sacrifice for my employer, since the cost of ink and paper was shooting up just like everything else but it put me into a higher tax bracket, so my take home pay actually got smaller. But I digress. As president, Jimmy Carter got the blame, rightly or wrongly, for the mess we were in. I'm not sure there was much he could have done. I know he tried. A huge tax cut might have helped, but he couldn't possibly get that through a Democrat-controlled Congress. Conservation efforts and renewed exploitation of local sources of oil did help, though not fast enough to save Carter from being a one-term president and becoming the best ex-president we've ever had. Now George W. Bush is facing his own oil crisis. The same oil producers who caused all the trouble then are at it again, holding back production and pushing up prices. We're being warned that prices may double this summer. In the interim, prices have been held artificially low so that U.S. companies haven't been producing much. It's too expensive to get it. They would lose money in many cases. Energy needs have basically not been addressed for more than a decade. Since OPEC increased production and reduced prices in the '80s, we've just been living on the good graces of the producer nations. Bush is addressing those needs in a comprehensive way for the first time in a long time. And though he may be coming up with the right answers, whether he is coming up with the answers that will get him reelected remains to be seen. If we have anything remotely like the economic crisis that hit us in the '70s, I'm guessing Bush will get his own chance to wow us with his charitable activities as ex-president, no matter if he should score perfect 10s in every other arena. He is right to emphasize conservation, and he is right to emphasize production. I don't care how many miles we can squeeze out of a gallon of gas, as our population booms we will have increasing demand. If supply doesn't increase along with demand, you know what happens. Prices are going to go up regardless. The key is to allow them to rise roughly in tandem with the average rate of inflation, rather than holding them down only to see them suddenly shoot through the roof at the whim of OPEC. We have more going for us now than we did in the '70s. For one thing, the federal budget is balanced. There's a surplus and, if the now-Democrat-controlled Senate doesn't derail it, we'll get a modest tax cut soon. I'm hoping this price spike will get U.S. companies back into the oil business to stay, and between that and conservation, we'll have OPEC members begging us to buy some more of their oil. I really don't want to have to go find my old WIN button.
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