A very bad column by Cal Thomas-who I often like-inspired me to do a little research on real gasoline prices over the last century. Thomas’ article is titled ?When gas was cheap and people were valuable.? It seems to me that the thrust of the article is to complain that-unlike the good old days of the 1940s and 1950s-the government isn’t doing enough to make people sacrifice themselves to the common good. It reads like an Ellsworth Toohey speech from The Fountainhead. My favorite quote from the article?
?Are we prepared for what could happen if gasoline reaches $5 a gallon, as it has throughout much of Europe? What if the bottom should fall out of the stock market and the value of our IRAs tank along with the economy? Is there a politician who would dare call for sacrifice and doing without for the greater good? How many people would respond favorably to such a call? Not many, I bet.?
I guess by Thomas’s standards, $5 a gallon and a bottom falling out of the stock market, wouldn’t in-and-of-itself induce enough sacrifice-we’d need politicians to heap a little more on us.
Anyway, I digress from my main point. In his discussion of the good old days, Thomas talks about the ?cheap gas” of the early1940s and late 1950s, so I decided to see exactly how cheap it was. In 1943 the nominal price of gasoline was 21 cents a gallon. In 2005 dollars this is equivalent to a price of $2.36, and this was with war-time price controls keeping the price artificially low (with the consequent shortages, as Thomas notes). How about the late 1950s, another era where he claims that ?gas was cheap.? The 1958 price of gas adjusted to 2005 dollars was $2.42 a gallon. In 1918 the real price of gas was $3.22 a gallon, and at the height of the great depression in 1938 the price was $2.76. The fact is that the first time Americans paid less than $2.00 a gallon in inflation-adjusted dollars was in 1963. Since then there has been price spikes which have sent prices souring to well above the $2.00 mark. The most recent record was set in 1981 when the price was $2.80.
