If you heat with oil and haven't checked this season's prices yet, please sit down. Costs have jumped up to approach historic highs, even during the long, hot summer when cold weather seemed so far in the future that you weren't even looking. Summer is the time when oil is usually the cheapest.
Check this: $2.537 per gallon. That's the average price found in a survey of lower Hudson Valley oil dealers Aug. 15 and posted by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority.
Compare this: $1.849, the average price last September, in the authority's report. Back then, they were not even collecting August data.
The government blames the international oil markets. But Lena Elmendorf, 75, of Hyde Park, blames the federal government. "The government is not worried about us; they're worried about themselves," she said. "How do they expect the senior citizens to make a living?"
Elmendorf rejects the supply-and-demand arguments offered by economists and attributes rising oil costs to President Bush's policies in the Middle East. "If our president would mind his own business and stay out of countries that don't appreciate what we do for them, I think we'd be better off," she said.
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050822/BUSINESS/508220308/1003