Letter to the editor

My wife and I have been locked in serious dialogue trying to make some kind of sense of why gasoline prices have gone through the roof lately, and we have arrived at an impasse. We've listened to the president's version and we've paid close attention to what oil company honchos have to say and we even considered consulting a ouija board. It seems that there is a world-wide shortfall of oil right now, driving up prices of gasoline at the pump. The logic is that since the oil companies have to pay more by the barrel, they must pass on the increase to you and I. Gee, that isn't too hard to understand, is it? I mean, when costs go up, everybody pays more down the line. All right then, all things being equal, margins of profit and loss, under these circumstances, should logically and/or theoretically remain unchanged. Everybody pays more and nobody profits more, except the oil producers...or so we believed, until the big oil companies revealed the horrific windfall profits they are reaping even as I write this letter. Now my wife and I are reasonably intelligent people and we are willing to sit quietly while the administration spin doctors and the oil barons of America try to softly stroke our troubled brows, but our attention spans have been seriously compromised and we desperately need someone to show us the math. So far, nothing computes.

George Morin
Auburn, GA