Via Dane Carlson comes this neat blog post backed up by actual data showing how gas prices now are historically very cheap. It's also worth mentioning that gas prices in the US are far lower than they are in pretty much the rest of the world.
It's like the deficit, which is enormous in raw dollars, but isn't historically large(PDF) as a percentage of GDP. Here's some of the raw data. Not that I support having a deficit or think it's not a problem, but it's just not that high historically. If the drunken sailors in congress can just sit on our collective wallet we should be able to grow out of it like we have in the past.
These things are interesting just economically, and I didn't start this post to take a jab at Kerry, but I feel compelled to point out that facts like these show that Kerry's complaints about gas prices and such aren't very serious. The Democrats constant harping on how "bad" the economy is is fundamentally dishonest[1], and ultimately unhelpful (to say the least), given that so much of economic activity is driven by collective psychology.
Footnotes:
[1]: I find it funny that Kerry invented a new 'misery index', which is completely different from the conventional and well-established "misery index", that's of course designed purely to point out whatever negatives he could find. One consequence of it is that it makes 1978 (Carter's "stagflation") appear to be a better economic situation than now!
Wednesday, April 14, 2004
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http://csf.colorado.edu/forums/debt/archives/msg00751.html