There are a couple minor differences though Gina. Yeah, you guys over in Europe are paying a pretty penny for gas, BUT, have been doing so for a VERY long time, correct? This isn't something that has changed in your economy in say, the last 3 years. Our gas prices have basically changed almost 300% since 2003, whereas I can recall that on pretty much all of my trips to Germany since 1996, you guys have been paying a fairly high price per gallon, relatively speaking (at least $3-4 a gallon back when gas here was $1 a gallon). Also, due to the way our cities, towns and infrastructures have developed, we are much more dependant on a car for daily commuting, which is our own fault of course, since everything was developed around the idea of cheap gas and driving everywhere. Over there, you guys pay a lot per gallon, but a large chunk of the price/gallon is taxes, which have been invested in a fairly extensive public transit network. A good example is a guy I knew in Switzerland. He lived about 5-8 miles from work, out in the country in a family farmhouse in a small village. Until he took a temporary position in the US in 1998 or so, he had never driven a car (and he was about 40-42 at the time), the only motorized vehicle he had was a scooter. He would take that scooter, or walk or bicycle, down to a bus stop in the middle of the countryside, and catch a postal bus to and from work every day. With the exception of a small minority of people in the US, that's almost impossible in the United States. There are some progressive communities where some people do this, but the majority have to drive to work, because there is no safe way to bicycle there, and walking is equally unsafe (since it's along the side of a highway often) and usually too far. HAD our country invested likewise in public transit, where someone like me could hop a train and a bus to work when I wanted to, and a car was a nice option if I could afford it, I think you'd hear nothing but the chirping of crickets on these boards regarding gas prices. When you add on top of that, the rises in daily food prices (especially the basic stuff), then it's twice as bad. There are predictions (which I wholeheartedly believe) that we will never go backwards below $4 a gallon here, until we switch to an alternative fuel. It might drop slightly below that from time to time, but I really think we are here to stay, and so far, the trend has proven me right. We thought we would never go above $2 years ago, and we did, and dropped back down briefly, before climbing to $3 (which no one thought we could do), and there was again a short drop below $3 again, before climbing back up above $3 and now we're at $4. I might even speculate that we will see $5 and $6 a gallon within a year or 2, and some are speculating on $7 by 2012.
We've seen similar things happen before where we poorly planned for things and made horribly wrong assumptions, and we've managed to turn things around when our backs really were against the wall (a very good example is the condition of our Army just prior to World War 1 and 2, where our Army was undermannned, underfunded and pretty much horribly neglected, because were weren't going to fight any more wars, and along came a crisis and BAM, almost overnight we had to build everything up from scratch, and it turned out ok for us)
We need that kind of effort on a national level now! We shall see just how much further it is before our backs really are against the wall.
