<LI class=textBodyBlack>Beer makers have been forced to raise their prices because of the skyrocketing price of hops – one of the principle ingredients. The price of hops has gone from about $4 a pound in September to $40 a pound. The price of barley, beer’s other main ingredient, has nearly doubled.<LI class=textBodyBlack>Pizza makers have seen their cheese costs soar this year from $1.30 a pound to $1.76 a pound. Even worse, the flour used to make the dough has gone from $3-$7 dollars a bushel to $25 a bushel in less than a year. <LI class=textBodyBlack>While most Americans fuel their cars with gasoline, most of the products they buy are transported by trucks, trains and ships that burn diesel. While gas prices are unlikely to rise as high as $4 a gallon, diesel may well pass that psychologically important level this spring, boosting prices of virtually every consumer product, said Tom Kloza, publisher and chief oil analyst at the Oil Price Information Service in Wall, New Jersey.

 

Add to the fact that most of the worlds oil is coming from third world countries where the mentality is run it till it breaks, whine because it broke, wait for someone else to come and fix it, wait for the countries bureaucrats to approve visas and work permits that take up to 2 months, no tools can be brought in or you lose them, add the list add infinitum.

 

Thank God big oil is getting their tax relief or else we would really be paying at the pump and thank G.W. Bush for looking out for me by threatening to veto any bill threatening to stop the tax breaks to big oil, since that would be a tax increase to them as he put it. Even though Exon has made the most proffits of any company in the history of the U.S.

They keep this crap up and Mexico is going to need the fence not us.

 

Exxon paid more in taxes than the bottom 49% of all US tax-payers combined. 41% of their profits. Then, the share-holders paid another 20% on top of that (that's just federal capital gains, add another 5-15% for state). Combine that with the gas taxes and you'll see the government is the real winner here, pulling the wool over your eyes and making you think the gas companies are raking it over on you, when in fact government makes far more from oil than the oil companies do.

So, if someone is in the bottom 49% of tax-payers, and they're asking for oil companies to pay more, why don't they also ask themselves why they want everyone else to step up and pay more taxes, so long as they don't don't have to themselves? Classic case of do as I say, not as I do... wouldn't you say? Its incredible how fear mongering gets people to think higher taxes are a solution. Don't think for one minute if taxes are raised that fuel prices won't go up to cover it.

 

let's not leave out the ethanol/biofuel component. more and more farmers are turning their acerage into corn fields becase of the mandates to use biofuels and a higher return on their investment. can't blame them either. Mo' Money..less hops and barley, feed corn, higher prices on staples.

 

Name one tax break big oil is getting.