By Jim Hightower
How high was your heating bill last month?
Heating bill!?! Here we are in the searing heat of a Texas August, and this boy is talking about heating bills! Doesn't sound like he's too tightly wrapped.
But wait a minute -- while you're fanning yourself and putting your feet in ice water just trying to stay cool, the Reagan Administration is planning legislation in Washington that would raise your winter heating bills and probably make your blood boil. The President's top men have recommended immediate price decontrol for natural gas. It's a move that would make the big oil and gas companies happy, but you'll be paying for their smiles, since it will double and possibly even triple your gas utility bills by 1985.
"Decontrol" has a nice ring to it, until you begin to examine what it costs, who pays for it and who profits from it. It turns out to be just another chorus from the old song, "Them that's got is them that gets, and I ain't got nothing yet."
In Texas alone, it is estimated that decontrolled gas prices would cost household users nearly $2 billion extra each year on our gas utility bills. But such a number is too big, too impersonal to grasp. Here's what it means to you: a typical homeowner's annual bill for natural gas under current law is $575, not exactly cheap -- but under the President's proposal, that would rise next year to $940.
And that's not the end of it by any means. In addition to this direct increase on our monthly gas bills, a rise in gas price also would radically inflate the cost of other things we buy. Most electricity in Texas is generated by natural gas, for example, and the White House plan would inflate that cost by $40.3 billion over the next five years, and the electric companies are allowed to pass every dime of that increase directly through to you under the "fuel adjustment" section of your light bill.
Small businesses and merchants will see their gas cost rise by a billion a year, and industrial users will get an increase of about $7 billion a year. Needless to say, practically all of this will be passed along to You-Know-Who in the form of higher prices for goods and services.
Well, yes, say the proponents of this price increase plan, but this is going to be good for Texas, since we are a natural gas producing state and decontrol means all of those Texans with gas wells will be in high cotton. Hold it, say the opponents of the plan -- we're all for helping any of the truly deserving little gas producers who might be financially strapped, but that's not what the President's bill does. Hiding behind the skirts of the little producers are the biggest companies in the world -- half of the gas produced in Texas is in the hands of 10 big oil companies, including Exxon (which controls a fourth of all Texas natural gas), Gulf, Mobil, Phillips and Shell, not exactly poor boys.
What do you say? Should we turn loose the utilities and oil companies to raise these gas prices, or should we hold the line? Make your opinion heard by writing directly to the President. He says he wants to hear from you -- give him an earful. His address is: President Ronald Reagan/The White House/Washington, D.C./20500.