Marshall Brain's Blog

There is something truly uncomfortable about this article:

Iraqis Paying 5 Cents a Gallon for Gas

From the article:

While Americans are shelling out record prices for fuel, Iraqis pay only about 5 cents a gallon for gasoline - a benefit of hundreds of millions of dollars subsidies bankrolled by American taxpayers.

American taxpayers pay $2 billion per year for this subsidy.

There are 100 million households, approximately, in the U.S. $2 billion per year means that your household, personally, is paying $20 per year so that Iraqis can get this benefit.

It will be interesting to see how they phase out this benefit. How, exactly, do you say to people suddenly, "OK, time to pay the real price -- $2 per gallon"?

Which brings up an interesting question -- What is the "real" price of gasoline? If you don't have speculators adding $10 a barrel to the price and oil companies gouging consumers as much as they can... That is, if all you pay is the real cost of pumping it out of the ground and refining it and trucking it to the gas station... Maybe the "real" price is only $1 a gallon.