Reply #11: Yes and no [View All]

I think it has gone up (relative to euros)in the last year or two, but before that, the dollar was dropping against the euro almost as much as the price of oil (traded in dollars) was going up. So it should have been fairly level (in euros) from about 2001 to the beginning of the war in Iraq. I don't know how that translated to the European gas pumps, though.

The US subsidizes a LOT of the gas price through income taxes (for the military budget and foreign aid), so the price is actually much higher in the US than it seems at the gas pump. How much of the US military budget is devoted to keeping access to oil? Not sure, but an awful lot of it, certainly.