Good Reasons to Price Gas Fairly

NPR is really the only thing next to Travis that I listen to during my drive time each day. Today's return from SH park was one of the times that I am glad I was listening.

The topic of the report was the potential for fuel suppliers to artificially increase the price of gas in order to increase their revenues. They mentioned that congress was addressing the issue and that voting was underway to enact legislation to prevent such unethical behaviour from occurring.

Maximum Penalties for infractions:

• Companies - Fines of up to a few billion dollars
• Individuals - Prison terms up to 2 million and 10 years.

Now I realize that I may have mis-listened. I was only catching bits of the report here and there so my details may be off a bit. If you know more accurate information, please feel free to let me know. For now, however, I am quite content to continue believing that an extra 20 cents per gallon at the pump for me means 2,000,010 years in the clink for the guy who made it happen.

When I heard this I immediately wanted to know how much time per person would need to be served. With a population of ~300,000,000 people in the US, each potential swindlee gets about .006667 years of the perp's life committed to prison. I did the calculation and that comes out to 2 1/2 days per person swindled.

I don't know what the guidelines would be for sentencing, but I like to think that every person who gets duped is entitled to 2.5 days. That way, if everyone in the country gets taken advantage of, you get the maximum penalty. If you only get half of us, your sentence gets reduced to 1,000,005 years and so on down to 2.5 days for getting one lowly sucker.

Moral of the story: Don't overcharge for gas.