Gasoline may have been a luxury item for auto owners in 1918, but of course gas purchases would have been a much smaller percentage of a car-owning family’s expenses then.

No one was making hour-long commutes at 80 miles an hour in an SUV, and the average mileage accrued in a year by the family car would be minuscule compared to the average now.

The article you pointed to said, “We need to be cautious because the economy could be in danger from high energy prices.”

I think out-of-control deficit spending by the federal government is more of a threat to our economy than higher energy prices– which actually reflect a truer valuation to the costs for society of fossil fuels when factors like environmental degradation and respiratory disease rates are accounted for.

The higher prices for their heavily-taxed fuels that European have historically ‘enjoyed’ are far more realistic than the lower ones that spoiled U.S. drivers and our shortsighted auto-making industry (both of whom learned nothing from the fuel crunch of the ’70s), have taken for granted for so long.

We need to face the fact that the party is over, and that if the economies of China, Russia and India continue to expand, further driving up demand, prices likely will keep going up, no matter what the fed does.

[I know that Russia holds major petroleum reserves, but the law of supply and demand applies to its economy as well.]