All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

It's ironic in an Alanis Morissette kind of way that gas prices are down now that the summer travel months are behind us. A USA Today poll from earlier in the year found that a third of Americans canceled vacations because of pain at the pump.

But in the past few days, gas station managers couldn't change those signs fast enough. The prices are dropping quickly…back to below three dollars a gallon in many areas. Crude oil…which makes up a big chunk of the price of gas…has fallen 44 percent since the spring.

Not to be the black fly in your chardonnay, but cheaper gas is kind of a mixed blessing. It means demand is down and people are spending less.

Some economists say it's a harbinger of a coming recession and possibly more job losses. If that's true, those four dollar gallons we bemoaned might have been a good thing. That's either ironic, or just the law of supply and demand economics.

Seth Doane is a CBS News correspondent based in New York.

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“It’s a no-win situation right now,” says Sharon Romano, “I don’t see anyone winning except the oil companies.”

Sharon Romano and her husband, Angelo, certainly aren’t winning these days; in fact they’re dangerously close to losing everything they’ve worked to build. As the owners of “Romano & Son Trucking,” a business that has been in the family for nearly 40 years, they’ve been squeezed by the high price of fuel.

They have to pay a daily diesel bill that runs in the thousands of dollars in order to keep their 12 trucks on the road hauling asphalt for their clients. In the Phoenix area, where the Romanos live, diesel prices have jumped nearly 60 percent in just a year. It has wiped out their profits. Sharon remembers, “It seemed like overnight for me… I woke up one day and thought ‘oh my God, how can we do this?’”

A friend told them that the cost of diesel fuel was about half the price in Mexico. Angelo thought, “Let’s take a ride.”

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Ben Tracy is a CBS News correspondent based in Los Angeles.

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A couple of weeks ago I received an e-mail from a producer in New York who said, “We’d like you to do a story on trickle-down economics.” I was kind of perplexed as to why we would be revisiting Ronald Reagan and the 1980’s.

I was quickly corrected. The story idea was actually about the effect someone at the top of the economic food chain (well-off person) cutting back their spending has on those of us further down (middle class and below).

It’s actually reverse trickle down economics.

So, we set out to find some people affected by someone else’s cutbacks. Believe me, it wasn’t hard.

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Peter Maer is a CBS News White House correspondent.

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The former oil man in the Oval Office refuses to predict the future course of gasoline prices. In a radio interview with CBS News in the White House Roosevelt Room, President Bush declined to offer his own price at the pump forecast. He recalled the hit he took earlier this year when, at a news conference, he told me that he had not heard about analysts' predictions of four buck a gallon gas. At the time he described the forecast as "interesting."

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CBS News White House correspondents Peter Maer (top left) and Mark Knoller (bottom left) interviewed President Bush in the Roosevelt Room at the White House.

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We had to wait nearly an hour for President Bush to enter the Roosevelt Room for our radio interview.

But actually, we’d been waiting more than seven years.

My colleague Peter Maer and I have been pitching the White House to grant us an interview with the president since the year he took office.

Most recently, we were told that Mr. Bush doesn’t like doing radio interviews. He doesn’t think his comments get a fair shake when we only use “snippets” of what he says in our radio reports and on the hourly radio newscasts.

Well, that’s the nature of the business. But through the magic of this podcast, you can hear everything thing he said, in the context in which he said it.

We were given 15 minutes, and tried to wring every nanosecond out of it.

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Click here to listen to the entire interview with President Bush.

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Peter Maer is a White House correspondent for CBS News.

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Comments by President Bush today raised questions about his level of awareness of what Americans are paying for gasoline and where prices could be headed. During a photo opportunity with his economic advisors, Mr. Bush mentioned gasoline costs as he made the case for permanent tax cuts.

He told reporters, "If you're worried about $3 gasoline and you think your taxes may be going up in two years, then the uncertain price of gasoline creates more uncertainty as you plan for your future."

It was unclear whether Mr. Bush was referring to concerns about current or future prices. Press Secretary Dana Perino insisted the president is "fully aware of $3 and up gas."

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Hari Sreenivasan blogs on his piece about fears in Port Arthur, Texas over plans to dispose of nerve gas waste there.

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Kelly Wallace is a CBS News Correspondent based in New York.

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I don’t have to tell you about rising gas prices. Chances are you’ve been at a gas station recently and the conversation you had with yourself went something like this, “I can’t believe the prices keep going up and up and up.” Maybe you added a few other choice words – but we want this blog to have a “G” rating.

At a New York City gas station not far from the CBS Broadcast Center, the price of a gallon of regular unleaded is $3.35 – up 36 cents from just a month ago. We learned today the national average price for a gallon is a record $3.10 – a few cents higher than the record levels we saw after Hurricane Katrina.

What’s going on? “A lot of it is supply and demand,” said oil analyst Andrew Lebow, senior vice president of Man Financial.

Okay, now that Economics 101 class you once took will come in very handy. Despite the record prices, Americans are still guzzling up – going through about 9.35 million barrels a day compared to about 8 million ten years ago.

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Today's First Look comes to us from Kelly Wallace, who offers a preview of her report for the Evening News on the rising price of gas.

Just click the monitor for more.

Hi, everyone.

A big part of President Bush's State of the Union speech was his proposal to cut gas consumption by 20% in 10 years.

But we may already be getting a jump on that. Researchers say that, for the first time in 25 years, Americans are driving less. Ridership is UP on subways and buses all over the country. Experts point to a number of reasons for it. Some of that is because of higher fuel prices. We're also getting older, and not commuting as much -- 14% of U.S. drivers are over the age of 65...nearly double the number in 1980.

William Millar, president of the American Public Transportation Association, says a "fundamental shift is going on" -- and people are continuing to curb their enthusiasm for driving, even after gas prices have dropped.

It'll take years to break our addiction to oil. But maybe we're on the road to recovery...or at least, looking for the off-ramp.

That's a page from my notebook.

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