Okay, the swearing in has happened, the balls are commenced. Now comes the sobering moment — there’s work to do, folks.
You see, many of us lost our jobs. I was fortunate to find work quickly. But others are still hurting. We’ve got to get work for them, and we’ve got to buttress our unemployment insurance programs for those who aren’t able to find work in the meantime.
We’ve got wars to end, troops to bring home, foreign alliances to rebuild. There’s an active Middle East conflict in progress, and godammit, we better really try to help bring about a peace this time.
Also, at home, there’s an urgent need to start real programs to try to stop global warming. We’ve got to kick into gear cleaner ways of generating energy, whether by tidal power, solar, wind, geo-thermal, whatever. There’s smarter, more efficient ways of going about our daily lives, like high-speed rail, hybrid vehicles, reusable bags at the grocery and drug stores. The list goes on.
The point I’m trying to make is, let’s recover from our inaugural hangovers and get to work. Lord knows there’s no shortage of work to be done.
I realize it takes like 17 years to turn the Titanic 45 degrees, but a stipulation on that $15 billion “bridge loan” Congress gave to Chrysler and GM last month should have been a mandate not to manufacture one more gas-guzzling car. Nothing below 25 or 30 mpg leaves the floor. Hell, the technology is there, why not insist that every car built from this point forward by those two companies be a hybrid?
Some days, I really don’t know what U.S. industry to hate most. As far as we’ve come, the priorities of individuals and businesses in this country are beyond whacked-out.
A couple of related posts on Andrew Sullivan’s blog today got me thinking about cars and raising the gas tax.
UPDATE: No sooner do I post this than I discover my former place of employment has advocated for the same. And in a much more insightful manner, to boot. Wired.com’s Dave Demerjian has more.
ORIGINAL POST: Now that the average price of a gallon of gasoline has fallen by well more than 50 percent since summer, state governments and Washington should both look into raising their tax rates on the fuel.
States are in trouble financially. California’s legislature is still battling it out with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to close a $40 billion budget deficit. I realize that increased gas-tax revenue alone won’t close that gap, but it will help, while also reducing consumption.
And the federal government can use that increase to help close its deficit (though I’m not of the opinion that reducing the national deficit is key at this time) and possibly also use it to invest in green-energy technology.
I usually try to see both sides of issues. And I understand that not everyone has the luxury, if it can be called that, to stop driving, or stop driving as much. But in tough times, we all need to adjust and make sacrifices. That’s something horribly absent from the so-called leadership of the past eight years — calls for sacrifice.
There’s also the fact that for those who absolutely do not have the choice not to drive, they’d be paying more to play. My answer to that is almost identical — an investment now in less-harmful means of generating energy will pay huge dividends down the road. That, and I don’t expect a bump in gas prices, nowhere near what we saw last summer, to bankrupt anyone. If that were the case, I would hold that all options were not exhausted.
I read something the other day, a story about a young person who was really excited that gas prices had fallen from summertime highs. “I’m gonna drive everywhere now,” the person said, in essence. That’s exactly the kind of recklessness low gas prices leads to. In order to curb consumption and help speed the development of healthier alternatives, we need a higher gas tax. Now.
I don’t own a car. The last two cars I owned, back in the late ’90s, were both Hondas. After growing up driving mostly Fords, the Civics I owned were such a relief. They just … worked. And they got kick-ass mileage, even back in the pre-Inconvenient Truth days.
I pretty much wrote off American cars a few months into my first Honda, before I wrote off owning any car for at least a while.
In the meantime, SUVs and Hummers happened, and I didn’t think I could be any more grossed out than I already was. The companies that made them (and to be fair, foreign car companies eventually got in on the guzzler action) seemed to be creating a demand, rather than fulfilling one, instead of doing the responsible thing and starting early to recognize that driving cars that literally burned through ridiculous amounts of gasoline wasn’t sustainable. They could’ve retooled production and saved all that money lobbying against increased fuel-efficiency standards, and instead made cars that were (you guessed it) more fuel-efficient.
I sound like someone who might applaud the likely death of at least two of the three big U.S. auto companies (General Motors and Chrysler), but I’m not. Not at all.
The fact that Congress’s bailout died tonight in the Senate, no matter how flawed, really does strike me as the equivalent of dropping a match into a house filled with flammable gases. We were starting to choke on the gases, but now we’re bound to be burned alive, I fear. And all for what?
I have no choice but to see the largely GOP move to stop this bill in its latest form as the ultimate in cynicism. As John Judis points out at TNR.com, the senators who threatened filibuster, rather than allow the bill to go before the Senate on an up-or-down vote, are letting Japanese auto manufacturers dictate the terms of American jobs in the their states, all because those senators (and also most capitalists in the world today) don’t believe in unions. The unions in Michigan get the workers there better wages and benefits. But instead of maybe, oh, you know, while we’re being socialists about it, allow Tennessee, South Carolina, and Alabama autoworkers to unionize, those outstanding Americans chose to act in a reactionary way that could leave as many as one million people with no work.
Of course I’m ecstatic over this, but what I really like is that the administration will hold states to real, measurable progress over public works. Also, I’d like to see “rail” included in any “roads and bridges” talk.
But the bit about schools and information infrastructure gets me all giddy. Still kinda can’t believe this guy is about to be our president (not a moment too soon, of course).
Ignoring the economy and my personal stake in it, I’m becoming quite a fan of the United States of America these days.
Okay, that’s the capsulized version. I just really trust that we’re reprioritizing, and doing it right this time. This really does feel like a once-in-a-generation election. Obama has already made some very important decisions, and despite disagreeing with a few, they’ve almost all been good ones.
Mr. Emanuel promised that a major economic stimulus would be “the first order of business” for Mr. Obama when he takes office Jan. 20. The focus of spending will be on infrastructure, specifically “green infrastructure,” which he said would include mass transit, upgraded electricity transmission lines, “smart” electrical meters that allow consumers to save money by using electricity at off-peak hours, and universal broadband Internet access, which he said would encourage telecommuting.
(emphases mine)
This, of course, is extremely encouraging, and exactly the kind of stimulus we need. I would’ve liked to have seen commuter rail on here, but I’ll live.
Notice that not a single Big Oil company is having problems these days. This all leads me to believe, with near certainty, that environmental calamity is inevitable. Because, while high oil and gasoline prices were a good thing (causing most Americans to realize maybe they should conserve and drive less), in the end, these petroleum companies who own a large chunk of our government are still so strong, so powerful. How they managed to come out of a negative growth period with historical profits nails the coffin shut in my mind.
Oh, and social mobility? Well, remember the telegraph? Black-and-white TV? Atari 2600? Forget it. Probably never gonna happen again.
What I want to see if executive pay at ExxonMobil for the quarter they just reported.
If the price of oil keeps failing, and today reached one-year record lows, why isn’t the price of gasoline falling as quickly?
I looked up four statistics: the price of oil at its peak (on or around June 6, 2008) and the average price of gas on or around that day. Then I looked at today’s oil low ($83) and the most recent figure for average gas prices.
In other words, oil has fallen 39 percent in four months. But in that same period of time, gas has only fallen $0.13 13 percent.
Is it that it will take awhile for the reverberations to hit the market? I have a hard time believing that. But then I’ll be the first to admit I know next to nothing about markets and economics.
I’ve always hated stupid people acting smart. It bugs me. If you’re dumb, own it.
Smart acting stupid is annoying, but only mildly so.
It struck me, watching the following CNN clip of Sarah Palin doing her damnedest to answer a question about energy, supposedly her policy strong-suit, that Palin is a classic example of stupid-acting-smart:
Matt Yglesias reports that McCain, in addition to agreeing that the Department of Education should be abolished, stated his desire to see the Department of Energy be eliminated. HUD, too.
Now, I’m a cynical bastard, and I bitch about things like public transportation, dirty streets, crime, and any number of examples of broken government on a daily basis. But my god, the answer is not to rid ourselves of the pillars of society. Remember your call to reform the system, senator? Why not just come right out and say, “We’re for abolishing the government.”
When I was teenager and flirted with anarchy (going so far as to wear T-shirts emblazoned with the circle-A symbol), I was on the receiving end of unbelievable amounts of shit. This guy, on the other hand, gets a legitimate shot at being president? What am I missing here?
I’m not Michelle Obama, so I have impunity in saying it: I am ashamed of my country.
I mean, what do I have to be proud of? Our record on international relations? Our economy? Our entertainment industry? Our environmental record? Schools? Banks?
I used to be okay with the United States. The 1990s were, taken as a whole, pretty great. There were plenty of bumps in the road, but income disparity shrank, innovation exploded, and we were well-liked the world ’round. Work was easy to find, and Seinfeld was on.
Now, what?
Anyway, the way I’m feeling about the upcoming election hinges on this question of pride and shame. If Obama-Biden pull it off (or, more accurately put, if the American voting public pulls it off for Obama-Biden), pride will be restored. It would be a mea culpa, a rejection of the bad policies and divisiveness of the last eight years.
But for McSame-HockeyMilf to win would serve as a stamp of approval for the dismal job Bush-Cheney have done. I cannot be proud of that, and instead, my shame will only harden. It may become permanent.
