Posted by Auguste May 5, 2008 in Conservatives Sure Are Funny
…to put it another way, if you think people should get an extra $40 this summer (an extremely optimistic view of what a gas tax holiday might save them), then give them an extra $40.
I will personally give $40* just to shut somebody up. If I have to listen to one more person-on-the-street spin Obama’s utter good sense and lack of pandering into some sort of reverse inside-the-beltway out-of-touch move, I may just torch an Expedition.
* Offer expires May 4, 2008.
26 Responses to “Bingo”
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I think the government should require gas stations to give out stamps like in the old days, so that we can have dramatic house-of-cards contests with our siblings to decide what to trade the stamps in for.
See, here’s my idea: instead of just giving a tax break to those in a position to by a brand new low-emissions and fuel efficient car, penalize the Hummer, Expedition, and Pathfinder Armada drivers. I drive a fuel efficient, low emissions vehicle that I bought used and didn’t get a tax credit. I’m not neccessarily saying I should get one, but the tax revenue from grossly oversized SUVs should go to something like subsidizing fuel for truckers to help keep other costs down or giving rebates to families that are dependent on their multiple vehicles (like my parents). Not only do you get, hopefully, some of those environment-crushing monsters off the road, but there’s more money to go around for people that aren’t all ready squandering there’s on a $40,000 truck and weekly $100 fill-ups.
Fortunately, my husband and I live in walking/biking distance of nearly everything, so we’re not feeling the gas crunch that bad. Others, aren’t so lucky.
wow….and with that 40 bucks i could fill up my dodge neon exactly once. what purpose is the suspension of the gas tax supposed to serve? either it serves no logical purpose or my thinking muscle is busted.
$40 won’t fill my Jetta up any more: it took $52 the other day. Even at the 30mpgs I’m getting it’s no picnic.
Does anybody know if you can auction off, say, a kidney, on ebay? I mean, I do have 2 of them…
Hillary should demonstrate her understanding of ordinary people’s desperation about gas prices, and prove her commitment to cutting the gas tax, by publicly siphoning somone’s gastank with a length of rubber tubing.
It would be like a more dangerous version of her shot-and-a-beer event a few weeks ago.
instead of just giving a tax break to those in a position to by a brand new low-emissions and fuel efficient car, penalize the Hummer, Expedition, and Pathfinder Armada drivers.
You don’t think those of us who use a big-ass motor vehicle to haul heavy stuff that bikes won’t move are penalized by current fuel prices?
I make my own, but that’s both a political and a lifestyle decision that only the privileged can begin to execute on.
I’m on the high ground staked out by Bill McKibben and Hunter Lovins: The right way to solve the problem of environmental destruction and high fuel prices is to let markets solve it, not continue to legislate solutions that create more unintended consequences.
It would make more sense to require companies to account for the impact over life cycle of what they sell at the front end, whether it’s a car or a carpet or electricity, and let markets innovate the rest. I can promise that if PG&E had to pay the costs of recovering the mercury released by their coal-fired power plants, they would buy some damn solar panels so fast it would make your head spin.
Because I’m that rarely-sighted bird, the Money-Grubbing Tree-Hugger, I can say all that.
But I too would like to see Hillary siphoning the way-home gas. In fact, if the campaign wants to set that up, I’ll gather 10 of my fellow capitalists to max out before she drops out. $23,000 could buy a lot of TV in…what’s left now?
I intend to spend my gas-tax windfall on buying more gas. That way we can all afford more gas because gas will be more affordable to the gas-buying public, which needs a lot of gas. Gas.
Quick, which is more oily: Marc Penn or a barrel of oil?
PhoenixRising:
If solving the problems of environmental destruction and high fuel prices were even vaguely profitable, the market almost certainly would have solved them already.
We need to be honest about the fact that it’s more profitable to rape the environment and fuck over consumers than it is not to — especially in the short term, which is by far the dominant mode of fiscal thinking, these days — so the market-based disincentives to doing those things are minimal at best. And I don’t know about you, but I’m certainly not going to sit back and just trust business leaders to do the right thing all by their lonesome, so the only thing left is government coercion in the form of regulation.
Of course that would make more sense, but it’s definitely not free-market economics. It also directly contradicts what you said in the first paragraph I quoted.
Am I the only one who noticed that Senators Obama and Clinton — and McCain — are running for president and trashing each other, arguin over something that will be over and done with long before any of them could become president?
“The right way to solve the problem of environmental destruction and high fuel prices is to let markets solve it, not continue to legislate solutions that create more unintended consequences.”
…and it’s obvious that The Market, left to its own devices, will “solve” problems - eventually.
The question is whether or not we want to live through the wild paroxysms of a dying oil market before it gets replaced with the next popular source of energy, and whether we can stop breathing long enough for the pollution and environmental destruction to cease.
It’s clear the oil companies will maintain a death grip on humanity until the price of oil is completely unsupportable (not just $150/barrel, but outrageous like $500/barrel). Considering how long alternatives will take to fully develop and integrate into our infrastructure, there may be a long and miserable gap between when oil is non-viable and before something is readily available to replace it.
The pollution story is the same. As long as the real costs of producing energy via oil/coal/hydro-electric/nuclear/etc. are not accounted for by The Market, no significant change will occur.
Can we wait that long?…
This on top of Hillary threatening Iran. (Iran only need to launch speed boats and pick up a fight in the gulf. And price climbs $2)
She is a genius. Perfect neocon manchurian candidate.
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/05/AR2008050500307.html?hpid=moreheadlines
Disruptions In Oil Supply May Extend Price Rise
When commodity markets opened in New York yesterday, crude oil prices pierced the $120-a-barrel threshold for the first time before settling at $119.97, a record.
The $3.65 jump in crude oil prices helped sustain the intensity of political debates about gasoline prices, which yesterday stood at a national average of $3.61 a gallon — a penny shy of a record and up about 55 cents this year. In an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America” yesterday, President Bush said that the price of gasoline troubled him “a lot” and that rising gasoline prices were “like a tax on the working people.”
Heh. Dana, stoppit now, this is IMPORTANT in terms of who becomes president!!
I may just torch an Expedition.
Don’t do it. Burning SUVs produce a ridiculous amount of toxic and greenhouse gases. Find a more environmentally friendly method of putting them out of action. Like, say, higher gas prices. Let’s forget the gas tax holiday and call for a gas tax increase.
“Burning SUVs produce a ridiculous amount of toxic and greenhouse gases. Find a more environmentally friendly method of putting them out of action.”
…artificial reefs?…
You don’t think those of us who use a big-ass motor vehicle to haul heavy stuff that bikes won’t move are penalized by current fuel prices?
See, that’s your problem right there: if you’d bought a Hummer, you would have gotten that nice $25,000 tax credit and could have bought yourself around 6,000 gallons of gas with which to torment all of those hybrid car owners with their lousy $1,500 tax credit.
@Dan: the “contradiction” exists only because you set it up as part of your strawman. There’s no conflict whatsoever between free-market economics and accounting for environmental damage: economists refer to these situations as externalities.
I strongly agree with PhoenixRising: the right way to handle pollution is to force the people benefiting from pollution to pay for it. The main reason for a simple, direct penalty (e.g. a per-gallon carbon tax) is that in addition to being the fairest it’s also impossible to game: the traditional, complex regulatory approaches are how we ended up with things like orthodontists paying less money to drive around in “work” hummers than you or I pay to drive far less damaging cars. If there are no exceptions this becomes impossible.
Where would you pay that? At the pump, for example? That’s a good idea, I wonder why no one’s thought of it before/
I hereby pre-retroactively apply for all such future offers with expired entry dates.
Thank you.
Auguste: Exactly! It took prolonged >$3/gallon pricing before people started questioning whether a 6,000lb SUV was the best way to haul their briefcase into work because it hard to ignore a harsh reality-check every week. One imagines that if gas approached European levels we might even rediscover public transit (although when I checked about a month ago we’d need to break $10/gallon before Amtrak would be cost-effective).
Another day another record
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/06/AR2008050600498.html?hpid=moreheadlines
Oil nears $123 on $200 oil prediction, supply concerns
Oil futures blasted to a new record near $123 a barrel Tuesday, gaining momentum as investors bought on a forecast of much higher prices and on any news hinting at supply shortages. Retail gas prices edged lower, but appear poised to rise to new records of their own in coming weeks.
A new Goldman Sachs prediction that oil prices could rise to $150 to $200 within two years seemed to motivate much of Tuesday’s buying, although a falling dollar and increasing concerns about declining crude production in Mexico and Russia contributed, analysts say.
The Energy Department raised its oil and gasoline price forecasts, but also predicted that high prices will cut demand more than previously thought.
Light, sweet crude for June delivery jumped to a new record of $122.73 a barrel before retreating to settle up $1.87 at $121.84 on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
Try this on..it isn’t that oil is getting expensive…it’s that our dollar is devaluing. Think peso.
What I find difficult to understand is why proponents of a carbon tax (gas, oil, coal) are pushing a revenue-neutral tax and not a revenue-positive one. I’m not being snarky. I’d really like to know why it’s a good idea to give rebates back to US consumers based on an even split share of revenue from the tax, or to proportionally decrease income or payroll taxes if a carbon tax is implemented… which are the revenue-neutral options thus far. To some degree I understand carbon taxes would be regressive, but if the cost of producing such high carbon-emitting goods is passed on to consumers, won’t consumers who can’t afford the higher cost of “super”carbon goods make more eco-friendly purchases? Wouldn’t this bring some sort of cost parity to green consumer goods, which, right now are pretty expensive compared to non-green consumer goods? Isn’t that worth a tax that, on its face, is regressive?
The pollution story is the same. As long as the real costs of producing energy via oil/coal/hydro-electric/nuclear/etc. are not accounted for by The Market, no significant change will occur.
Precisely. And that’s why deep6 has it figured out: Government’s role in setting energy policy should be to impose the costs of energy on the users, not to attempt to level the playing field so that taxation of energy use is less regressive.
The reality is that the market can solve the energy crisis and the climate crisis given the right set of inputs, and governments cannot–or we would have done it already.
If we taxed carbon use flatly, and stopped subsidizing Big Oil to the tune of about 20 billion dollars a year, Big Oil would be motivated to clean up its act. Tomorrow.
Obviously markets can’t solve problems they are incentivized to ignore, and they’re lousy mechanisms for setting policies and goals. What markets are really good at innovating solutions to problems that cost existing businesses money or create opportunities for profit in new kinds of businesses. Capitalism is incredibly creative.
However, at this time our energy policies hobble that creativity by subsidizing dumbth at the corporate level.
This is how I would do it…
1. Decouple farming from oil (farming equipment, basic logistic transportation, etc.) I don’t think it is a stretch to create electric/hydrogen farming machinery.
One would also imagine, some sort of fuel cell/electric truck system to transport farming product to distribution point is easy.
2. Really push for low gas mileage. (doubling it within 5 years for basic sedan isn’t far fetch)
3. Tax recreational utility car to the moon. Wanna drive SUV? how about 500% tax + 1000% pollution tax. (okay maybe not that high, but if somebody want to play macho and pollute the planet. Show the money.
4. Time to kill suburban. Commuting 40-50minutes doesn’t make sense. It is time to design smarter city. (think Oakland, Seattle, Amsterdam, etc)
Suburban is the very essence of waste. (land use, ecological footprint, transportation cost, etc)
If I were the power that be. I’ll build a city like Monaco or Amsterdam. Except sprinkled with mega high rise and plenty of mix use open space. This instead of medium/lowrise.
My *parents*, lifelong Republicans who are now RINOs because the party has turned into something they can’t support, say that if the gas tax is lifted, the companies will just raise their prices. They are saying we should add to the gas tax to add incentive to conserve.
If Republicans, albeit ones with good sense who are edging towards being Progressives can see this, Obama should win.
Re: Amtrak being cost-effective only with rising gas prices.
WTF is Amtrak doing in the rest of the nation? California Amtrak is lowering prices on the valley line… something I attribute to the gas prices. More passengers per train = lower cost per passenger. Lower cost means more passengers forgoing the drive for the ride. It’s taking advantage of a chance to raise efficiency.
Can y’all call for better management of your trains?