Are you feeling some relief at the pump?
Maybe just a little?
Check this out:
The peak of the oil prices was at $147 a barrel in mid-July when the national average cost of gas was $4.00 a gallon.
Now it’s $3.82 a gallon.
That is a $0.18 reduction. Now, I have personally seen a larger decrease (from $3.95 to $3.55).
That 18 cents is not even a 5% reduction.
Why do I say "just"?
Because the price of oil is now down to $115 a barrel, which is a 21% reduction!
So if we go off the national average then oil reduced by 21% while the national average for gasoline only reduced by 5%
Even the places that reduced gas prices the most didn’t even reduce it by half the percentage as that of the actual cost of oil. The end result will be – wait for it – even larger profits for the oil companies while consumers struggle to get by.
While some oil company apologists like to sink their teeth into OPEC (and I am not saying they deserve a get-out-of-jail free card), it seems the OPEC countries reduced their costs of oil per barrel by four times as much as the domestic oil companies have reduced their costs of gas to us.
It is things like this that ought to have us consumers organizing into consumer councils so as to protect ourselves from such predatory practices.
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