Hey, you!

Yeah, you. Sorry to interrupt your Sudoku and your crossword (shouldn’t you be paying attention to the teacher, anyway?), but there’s something I want to talk to you about.

Gas prices.

There’s a scene in the original “Die Hard” where a policeman is standing next to the sign at a gas station. If you pause the movie there, you can see fuel costs 79 cents a gallon.

I’ll let you think about that for a second.

“Die Hard” came out 20 years ago, and in the intervening years, things certainly have changed. These days, a trip to the pump is starting to feel like getting dental work done. With gas prices what they are now, someone making $20,000 a year is spending 10 percent of his or her income filling up their gas tank, according to a CNN report.

This may not affect you directly; many college folks don’t have jobs, don’t have cars and don’t generally have to worry very intently on the cost of crude oil. But everything you do is connected to our favorite substance: black gold, Texas tea. The cost of everything from the sandwich you buy at lunch to the medicine you get for the “cold” you suddenly catch the day your term paper’s due is affected.

People tend to look at the cost of oil as being something uncontrollable, like the weather, or Britney Spears’ sanity. But there’s plenty that can be done to change the price at the pump.

And you can do it yourself.

The price of crude oil is affected greatly by geopolitical factors. For example, gas prices hovered around $1.50 a gallon until the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Since then, according to the Department of Energy, prices have spiked like crazy and haven’t looked back much. Whether Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or John McCain gets elected will have a huge effect on our policies in the Middle East and, by extension, the cost of Middle Eastern crude oil. The way we handle other oil-rich nations, such as Venezuela, also hangs in the balance.

On the domestic end, different types of fuel additives change the cost of gas, too. Us Midwesterners are quite familiar with the concept of ethanol. There’s a lot of controversy about ethanol – whether it helps the environment or hurts it and the effect it has on global food prices.

Regardless of what you think about ethanol, one thing is certain: The inclusion of ethanol in our gas is decided by legislation – and the legislation gets put through by the people we vote for.

In Illinois, the taxes on gas hover around 58 cents a gallon. Those taxes go up the closer you get to Chicago. Depending on where you or your family live, those taxes could go up or down, depending on the locally-elected representatives who control our budgets.

Meanwhile, the House is investigating American gas companies. Those companies posted record profits last year, and our legislators are questioning whether or not that’s fair.

It’s too late for your vote to have any effect on their decisions this time around, but in the future, your vote will have a huge effect on your wallet.