Anything over $1/gallon is too high.
I recently filled up at a station that had serious traffic problems. Soneone else who was filling up his car remarked, “Man, this place is busy! Must be cheap or something.”
Regular unleaded was $3.659 at this particular station. A few years ago, if you told me I’d consider that a low price for gasoline, I would have said you were crazy. And really it’s only good relative to what I’d pay elsewhere; it really wasn’t too terribly long ago that I could completely fill the 12-gallon tank in my Miata and get change back from a $20 bill.
Consider this. In 1964 a silver dollar bought 3 gallons of gas at .30/ gallon. Today that silver dollar is worth $22. It buys around 6 gallons of gas. It’s not that the price of silver has gone up. What has happened is the value of a dollar has dropped. In 2008 there were $900 billion dollars in circulation. In 2009 it was $1.8 trillion and a year later it was $3.1 trillion.
Gas has not gone up in real value terms. In real value terms it is about .15/gallon in 1964 dollars. Partially, that is because last year 25% fewer miles were driven. This is because fully 17% of the workforce is not driving to work. Also, probably half of the country is not going on their usual driving vacations. We suddenly have so much over capacity that we’re shipping gas off-shore.
If the economy recovered to pre-Obama times then the price of gas will surge to $8/gallon. (.30/gallon in 1964 dollars.)
We used to pay 3 cents for stripper well gasoline ~