I remember when I got my driver's license and the first tank of gasoline I pumped into the tank of my 250,000-mile 1991 Pontiac Grand Prix SE cost just 96 cents per gallon. My parents paid me an allowance at the time for the work I did around the family farm at a rate of $20 per week. In addition to my minimum-wage job washing dishes at a local greasy spoon, I was practically rolling in cash for a 15-year-old. Now I'm forty, and I paid over $8 per gallon for diesel in California last week. That sub-dollar fuel didn't last very long, because the same things are true now as they were back then: there's a Republican president in office dropping bombs in another country, the value of the dollar is tanking, and there's a global economic crisis.