[AMGoff]

Good lord... every year something like this comes up and most likely because some hippy-dippy college kid in California had some great epiphany between his second and third joints.

As has already been said... this is nothing more than a fruitless exercise - not buying gas on one day won't accomplish bo-diddly because it does nothing to address any of the reasons of why gas prices have gone as high as they have.

All sides of this argument and their respective solutions seem to do nothing but chase their own tails.

Yes... refining capacity is pretty much maxed out in this country - but that has nothing to do with the fact that the crude which gets refined is a speculative commodity. Yes... the government places a tax on gasoline, but suspending that tax will only do more harm than good because:

A. That 18 cent tax elimination won't be reflected as a drop in price at the pump and,
B. The last thing we need right now is the elimination of another tax because there won't be any cuts in federal spending to go along with it.

Massive deficit spending and subsequent debt is a contributing factor to the problem. If nothing else, the only thing the Federal government needs to cease (at least temporarily) is the stockpiling of crude in the Strategic Reserve... granted, it won't even put a dent in overall consumption, but we need to do things to lessen demand - not increase it like a suspension of the gas tax would do.

None of the solutions being presented currently will do a damn thing to two of the biggest contributing factors, those being the devaluation of the Dollar and global demand. Our dollar doesn't buy as much as it used to and it's not the demand of the US which is skyrocketing... demand in this country has risen at a steady, predictable clip... it's places like China and India where demand is increasing exponentially. There's only so much oil being produced and refined... and more and more people want it.

Is the rest of the world not going to buy gas on that day?

The only thing any of us can do to really make a difference is by personally giving up petroleum period... wanna make a difference? Go buy an old diesel and run it on veggie oil... or go buy a plug-in electric vehicle because sadly, at $3.50 a gallon - we haven't seen anything yet.