Since you can’t shake a stick these days without hitting someone who is complaining about gas prices (and seriously, you should maybe consider hitting them) I thought I’d take a look at the comparative search volume for “gas prices,” which tend to be the proletariat’s barometer for whether we are all headed for Hades in a handbasket or not, and “inflation,” the bugaboo in the closet economists generally would prefer to wring their hands about. Looks like the general search volume for the two has been running neck and neck for most of the last 12 months, except that recently, gas prices have decoupled from inflationary concerns and broken out. (Makes you wonder if there’s anything going on in the Middle East right now.)

But hey — Bernanke and Geithner said oil prices won’t cause inflation, so it has to be true. No way will this get passed on to us in higher costs at the grocery store, or at Target or anything. The lack of “inflation” searches in the top part of the chart tells me the public might be buying that for now, though with the number of news stories about inflation starting to ramp up (line at the bottom) we’ll see how long that lasts, I suppose.