$4.479 for gas

On Saturday, June 14, I paid $4.479 for gas at Sam’s Club. That’s up 46 centavos from the $4.019 I paid just paid two weeks ago at the same place, the cheapest I can find in these inflated parts.

That means gas is going up almost $1 a month. So it could be, if this keeps up, $10 a gallon by the November election.

It’s hard to see how McCain can win with gas going up this much. Here’s the reason gas is going up:

1. Inflation to pay for the The Iraq War. Bush-Greenspan-Bernanke decided to pay the bills by inflating the dollar. Gold now is at about $870 an ounce, almost tripling from when Bush came into office. (Commodities closely follow gold prices.) That accounts for most of the rise in gas prices, from about $1.13 a gallon when Bush took over to the $4.479 now (where I live in Orange County).

2. The Iraq War itself, and the expected Iran War, which have disrupted the oil supplies.

Either way, you have to blame Bush and the Republicans, who also controlled Congress during most of this inflationary period.

McCain has no alternative to the inflation. He wants to keep the Iraq War going, and his favorite song is, “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, Iran,” which he actually sang to the tune of “Barbara Ann.” (YouTube here.)

Obama doesn’t have an alternative either. He’s not talking about returning to the gold standard, the only way to stop the inflation. And he has become eager to “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran,” too.

So save your pesos and expect to pay even more for gas. We’ll even likely end up with 1970s-style gas rationing, too, as under the inflationary Nixon-Ford-Carter “malise” years of the 1970s.

McCain’s folks might be right that Obama would bring us Jimmy Carter’s second term. But what they don’t tell you is that McCain would bring us Nixon’s third term.