Wasting a vital high tech gas on balloons is stupid, but expecting the pandering lawmakers in DC to protect this rare, strategic, American resource, is worse. Helium needs better lobbyists.

This will be a serious obstacle to my plan to launch myself into the stratosphere in a lawn chair.

The article talks about setting "fair prices" and making sure everyone gets a "fair share". Can we never escape the concept that government is somehow more fair than a free market? Blasted communists are even into gasses.

Its most important use is never even mentioned. If you inhale it, it makes you talk funny.

Widely used at liberal´s parties since they have no real sense of humor,they have to falsify it,like everything else they do.

I´ve noticed the absence of high, squeaky voices recently.

Helium is plentiful on the Sun, but Obama has already announced that he will kill plans for a pipeline to Earth.

Gubmint wants to control the price of, and access to, everything. My son needed a battery for his car yesterday and I was stunned at the price. Parts store guy says they have doubled in the last three years and he was right. I asked why, and he replied that I wouldn´t want to hear his political views....

Funny, #2.

#2, Already been done... but you knew that. ;)
http://www.darwinawards.com/stupid/stupid1998-11.html

I paid $135 for a new battery for my Honda Civic. $10 was for installation. I was shocked at the price.

I became aware of this about four years ago. NASA uses a lot of it and has had concern over this for years. This can cause a lot of disruption in many industries but will also stimulate innovation.

US had trillions of mcf of this in storage near Amarillo - prolific byproduct in gas fields near there. Nixon decided to let it go because there was no use for it. Once released it escapes the atmosphere into outer space....

One of my late relatives had land holdings in the area close to those fields. When she & her husband started out farming in the thirties, lots of their friends & neighbors gave up on ranching & farming & sold out. Her husband had a hunch that if they stayed put & bought up land that someday there would be oil & gas exploration. He was right & died rich. His widow lived very well for many years on what she called her "gas" checks.

Helium gap!!! We´re all gonna die!!! /s

Under a capitalist admin., this would be a huge money maker... sell the operation to a private sector, who can resell it to the world!

Silly article focused on party balloons. More importantly, we should know more about the 1996 law that "required" the Federal Helium Reserve to be depleted. What kind of short-sighted boondoggle was this? It sounds insane - so more information would have been appreciated about it rather than the price of party balloons or Danny Deckchair (my son-in-laws favorite movie). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Deckchair

The lighter side of helium & a blast from the past.
When my son was in college , he introduced me to the morose Swedish playwright via,"August Strindberg and Helium": Helium of course symbolizing levity.
For an amusing diversion http://www.strindbergandhelium.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium

"In 2008, approximately 169 million standard cubic meters (SCM) of helium were extracted from natural gas or withdrawn from helium reserves with approximately 78% from the United States, 10% from Algeria, and most of the remainder from Russia, Poland and Qatar."

Basically, the USA is the primary supplier of Helium to the planet and we´d been giving it away through the Helium Privatization Act of 1996.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve

It´s time we jack up the exportation price of He by a couple of thousand percents.