Heating costs, thread continuation and thoughts:

[Native_NM]

And it many cases it's cheaper and easier because our own government drove up the cost of doing things ourselves thus putting millions of Americans out of a job. Great plan.

The spread between Pw and Pr is taxes.  Since Pr (in aggregate) is based on the elasticity of the product relative to the entire basket of goods, the lower Pw, the more the government can tax.  There is a hypothetical max Pr that the public can pay.  Saudi crude keeps Pw low enough that they can tax the heck out of it and Pr is still affordable to most people.  The average gas tax per gallon right now is $0.45 cents per gallon.  It is not variable.  When gas was $2.50 a gallon last year, the tax rate on each gallon was ~ 25% at the pump.  For a family with a marginal rate of 15%, the effective tax rate for each gallon of gas is over 25% at today's price.  To earn $3.65 net, you have to gross $4.75.  For a family in the 28% bracket it skyrockets.  It is all about the money.  Gas tax revenue is well over $100 billion a year.  Not chump change.  Many families pay more in federal and state gas taxes than they do federal income tax.  Check out irs.gov for the details.

I'm not opposed to gas taxes if they were used for the right reasons.  Gas is still a bargain in most cases.  As the price goes up, most people cut back. 

[ScottA]

You missed the hidden taxes. All these oil selling nations are required to buy US debt, thus a large portion of the COST of the oil is returned to the government via debt. So you have that plus the actual tax. But it gets even better. By keeping U.S. and other oil off the market they keep the price up. This creates a demand for the dollars they are printing up out of thin air which is another hiddden tax known as inflation. If I had to guess I'd say 60% of the cost of gas is directly related to tax and hidden taxes.

[rwanders]

While I agree that our energy dependence is due, in large part, to our political decisions and kowtowing to extreme and often ignorant environmental advocacy groups. It is not due to control of oil supplies by "big oil companies" . Many assume they own the oil reserves in the mid east and other regions----they do not. Those oilfields and the oil is, in every location I know of, owned by the countries they are in. The oil companies are merely contractors who are hired to develop those assets. All the major oil companies, combined, actually own and control less than 10% of proven reserves----they are not  able to "set prices"---believe me, if they did, the price per barrel would never fall to less then $10 which it has several times in recent years----as it did in the mid 1980s when a small oil company I and a few others owned was forced to close its' doors----but not before we had expended $11 million----but it was fun for a while, being pseudo-rich.