On Mon, 1 Oct 2001 11:33:41 Declan McCullagh wrote:

On Mon, Oct 01, 2001 at 09:55:34AM -0500, Harmon Seaver wrote:

...

Besides which, the true cost of gasoline at the pump would be $10-15 @ gallon without all the gov't subsidies to the oil industry.

I think this canard has been debunked on the list in the last week.

One more bit of debunking. According to the EIA the US uses on average over 8 million barrels of gasoline a day. The petroleum industry defines a barrel as 42 gallons. That's 336 million gallons a day or 123 billion gallons a year. If each gallon is subsidized by $10+ per barrel, the annual sudsidy from the government to the oil industry would be, at a minimum, $1.23 trillion a year. Total GDP in 2000 was only $9.2 trillion. This is non-sense. Or is this subsidy desquised as the defense budget, social security payments and service on the national debt? Jim Windle Join 18 million Eudora users by signing up for a free Eudora Web-Mail account at http://www.eudoramail.com