Fortunatley, it's not that easy to fool people with this lame attempt. Let's look at the truth. Below is a recent NY Times article that does a nice job of summarizing the European situation. It states that in France, gasoline has gone up 8% in the last year. Which actually doesn't sound too bad. But then you have to realize that gasoline is far more heavily taxed in France than it is in the USA, so a change in the price of the actual gasoline is diluted percentage wise by the high taxes. If you exclude taxes, gasoline in France actually went up 19% in a year.
That plus reactions to the soaring European prices, protests, etc are very nicely covered in the NY Times piece. Long live the truth!
PARIS =97 Marie Schneberger has always been thrifty about gasoline. The high price of filling up made it prohibitively expensive for Ms. Schneberger, a middle-income airline employee, to own anything bigger than a Fiat subcompact.
But with prices surging past 1.40 euro a liter in France (about $8.20 a gallon), Ms. Schneberger=92s old economies have proved insufficient. So, she recently started taking the M=E9tro to work and splitting the use of her car with two other women, to share fuel costs.
Truckers stopped traffic in London Tuesday to protest fuel costs and to demand government fuel rebates.
For instance, the cost of a liter of unleaded gasoline surged 17 percent in the last 12 months in Britain, 15 percent in Austria and 8 percent in France.
Yet, the latest price shock has reignited the trend. Moshiur Rahman, a
28-year-old newspaper vendor in London, said higher fuel prices meant that he could no longer afford to drive to work. He now travels more than an hour by train every day.In Warsaw, where gas prices are nearing 5 zloty ($2.31), a liter, Leszek Tumkiewicz tries to leave his Polonez =97 a fuel-intensive communist-era car =97 at home."