Chavez: Oil Is Cheap Compared to Wine….

If you sit down and enjoy a glass of wine tonight with your evening meal, you can be thankful that your car does not run on the stuff. Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s president said yesterday that that record crude prices are actually cheap — compared with wine.

Chavez, a price hawk in OPEC who governs over some of the largest reserves outside the Middle East, did some mental arithmetic about the price of wine per barrel and concluded it was 20 times as expensive as oil.

“They blame me for these so-called extremely high oil prices. Well, are they going to say (the wine price) is my fault too?” he asked. “Oil is only $100” a barrel, said Chavez, “You see how cheap it is?”

Although Chavez subsidizes gasoline at home, he has hiked taxes on alcohol this year, saying Venezuelans’ high consumption of drinks such as whisky was anti-revolutionary.

Enjoy that anti-revolutionary tipple this evening…