Cities with the Most Expensive Gas

As we head into Labor Day weekend, gasoline prices nationally are down about 21 cents a gallon from last year to around $3.57 a gallon, according to GasBuddy.com. Marking the traditional end of the summer driving season, next week’s holiday presents a good opportunity to look at gas prices around the country.

An unanticipated closure of an East Coast refinery sent prices soaring to a year-to-date high by mid-February. Gasoline prices have fluctuated since then, but have been trending slowly downward. Prices in some cities remain exceptionally high, however, at least 25 cents more than the national price. Gas in Honolulu as of earlier this week averaged $4.23 per gallon. These are the cities with the most expensive gas.

Click here to see the 10 cities

Americans are driving less and as newer, more fuel-efficient vehicles replace older ones in the country’s fleet, demand is also decreasing. The main reason that crude oil and gas prices remain high is uncertainty about the future availability of crude. Events in the Middle East, the source of more than a third of the world’s supply of crude, figure heavily in market prices for crude and eventually gasoline. The threat of military action in Syria has driven up crude and gas prices since late Monday, with West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude for October delivery trading near $109 a barrel on Tuesday.

In the nine cities with the highest gas prices, four of the cities are on the East Coast, two are in California, and there is one each in Alaska, Hawaii, and Idaho. The concentration of cities on the East Coast is due to a variety of reasons, the most important of which is that Northeast refineries obtain most of their crude oil from non-U.S. sources, raising the cost of refined products and ultimately the price for consumers. Gregg Laskoski, senior petroleum analyst at GasBuddy.com points out, “for a long time the Northeast has had to rely on Brent crude oil, which has to come across the ocean from Europe.”

Via:24/7 Wall Street

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Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.): Raising Fast-Food Industry Wages to $15/Hr. Would Lead to 'Millions of Jobs Created'

HOW DOES LAYING OFF PEOPLE CREATE JOBS???

Illinois Democratic Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky added her ignorant voice to the cacophony of economic confusion Thursday on the low-rated MSNBC show hosted by Chris Hayes. If a Republican congressperson made a statement as breathtakingly ignorant as the one you're about to see, it would get wider media play. Schakowsky's "brilliant" suggestion almost certainly won't.

Why has nobody thought of this fantastic idea? Here it is as "articulated" by Schakowsky in response to a question from Hayes (HT Bridget Johnson at PJ Tatler; bolds are mine; click on the "transcript" tab at the link to see the full text of the discussion; the original transcript has no caps and is missing some punctuation, but yours truly has added them where needed):

HAYES: What do you say to the people watching this and saying, "look, this is between the employees of Mcdonald's and their employer? This is a private market encounter that happens between people seeking work and those who are looking to hire folks, and it's not really any of your business, respectfully, Congresswoman, what they pay their workers"?

SCHAKOWSKY: Look, this is an entire industry that is paying poverty wages in this country, and thousands and tens of thousands, maybe millions of people who simply can't make it on those kinds of wages. And i think that forming a union, getting $15 an hour, which makes a modest income of about $31,000 a year, if you get to work full time, is something that is a proper demand. And actually these workers are acting -- are going to the employers, are going to these companies. I'm standing with them because i think we need it for our economy. If they got paid more, we're going to see millions of jobs created because there are going to be consumers in the marketplace.

On that basis, I'm going to support an across-the-board minimum wage increase to $25 per hour. Everyone with a full-time job deserves $50K. (/sarc)

Given that the workers granted $15 or $25 per hour will at best be marginally more productive — the only argument I see is that some will be more focused on their work if they're under less financial stress, which may be true in some instances but won't be in many others — what Schakowsky is essentially arguing for is an employer-sponsored "stimulus" program. The trouble is that arbitrarily and hugely increasing wages across the board to way above market value, which is what Schakowsky really wants to do, will lead to inflation which will gobble up a significant portion of the just-obtained pay increase. It will also cause McDonald's and other employers to take a harder look at automating more of the processes, causing them to need fewer employees.

I'm pretty sure that the period in the parenthetical which usually follows the congresswoman's name is a typo. She would more correctly be described as "(D-Ill)."

Most Americans oppose cutting off funding for Obamacare, poll shows

Syracuse, N.Y. -- While many Americans still have a negative view of Obamacare, most oppose the idea of cutting off funding to stop the law from being implemented, according to a poll.

The poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found 57 percent of Americans disapprove of the idea of defunding the law.

Obamacare, formally known as the Affordable Care Act, requires most Americans to get health insurance next year or face a financial penalty. Some lawmakers in Washington, D.C. who oppose the law say that if members of Congress cannot repeal it, they should cut off funding to stop the law from being put in place.

The most common reason poll respondents cited for opposing defunding is that "using the budget process to stop a law is not the way our government should work."

But public opinion of the law continued to tilt negative. The poll shows 37 percent of Americans say they have a favorable view of the law and 42 percent have an unfavorable view, shares that have held relatively steady since February.

Roughly half the public continues to say they don't have enough information about the federal law to understand how it will impact them and their family.

Via: The Post Standard

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Demand Transparency in Education Spending

In most states, education is the most expensive item in the budget. However, there is frequently some question on exactly how much is being spent and on what. The Cato Institute dug in to see what they could find out about transparency in educational spending around America.

In Cato’s new report Cracking the Books: How Well do State Education Departments Report Public School Spending?, they take a look at just that issue of transparency. The transparency of different states was scored by four criteria: per pupil expenditures, total expenditure, average salary, and public accessibility. States were assigned a certain number of points in each category, and total number of points corresponded to a letter grade.

In case you were wondering, it’s not looking good out there, folks. Only one state, New Mexico, scored an A, and only eighteen states scored a C or higher. Ten scored an F-, with an additional eight coming in with an F. That means that most states in our union stink at reporting public education spending. When a government operates behind closed doors like this, how are voters and taxpayers supposed to make informed decisions? Wasn’t this supposed to be the most transparent administration in history?

In Obama’s America, the government seems to think that they know best and that the people don’t really need to know much of anything. They seem to have forgotten that they work for us, and that we expect timely and accurate reporting. Let’s stop accepting this and remind them who is in charge.

We have a special kind of power in this country of ours. That is the power to boot officials out of the government. We don’t have to accept this behind-the-scenes form of governing. Contact your elected representatives at every level and demand more accountability.  We deserve to know where our tax dollars are going. 

Via: Freedom Works

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