Congress asks why mega-rich oil companies need welfare

[bob]

I was reading today about a guy who spent $39,000 on an SUV about two years ago. Now with the gas prices he can’t afford to fuel the thing. Nor can he sell it because nobody else wants to pay the gas bill either. Gotta say…

Just think, if the increased tax on gas that many of us had recommended years ago had been implemented the demand for the stuff would have been reduced by now, the oil companies couldn’t have raised their prices, and all that money going to fat cat oil company owners and executives could have been used to pay for the war in Iraq. Instead the debt to China is increasing and everybody is wondering where the funding for schools and hospitals is going to come from.

[redandy]

ust think, if the increased tax on gas many of us had recommended years ago had been implemented the demand for the stuff would have been reduced by now, the oil companies couldn’t have raised their prices, and all that money going to fat cat oil company owners and executives could have been used to pay for the war in Iraq. Instead the debt to China is increasing and everybody is wondering where the funding for schools and hospitals is going to come from.

Maybe it would have made a difference and maybe it wouldn’t have. Any guess as to how much to tax would have been a shot in the dark. Meanwhile you would have been causing the same round of problems as we have now, purely on the speculation that at some point – we didn’t know when – gas prices would skyrocket. Also note that before the late 90’s SUV boom it was more likely that poor or middle class people who still had cars from the 70’s were the ones with low fuel efficiency.

[bob]

@redandy

Just think, if the increased tax on gas many of us had recommended years ago had been implemented the demand for the stuff would have been reduced by now, the oil companies couldn’t have raised their prices, and all that money going to fat cat oil company owners and executives could have been used to pay for the war in Iraq. Instead the debt to China is increasing and everybody is wondering where the funding for schools and hospitals is going to come from.

Maybe it would have made a difference and maybe it wouldn’t have. Any guess as to how much to tax would have been a shot in the dark. Meanwhile you would have been causing the same round of problems as we have now, purely on the speculation that at some point – we didn’t know when – gas prices would skyrocket. Also note that before the late 90’s SUV boom it was more likely that poor or middle class people who still had cars from the 70’s were the ones with low fuel efficiency.

What problems? The ones that CNN is talking about to keep us scared? Gas has never been [edited] nearly expensive enough. If it was there wouldn’t be so much urban sprawl, so much traffic. Anybody who bought an SUV can lick my hairy left testicle.

[redandy]

What problems?

Economic downturn, possible recession, higher costs of transport, ripple effects. Also, why not just admit that people like their big cars that they can haul a soccer team around in, as well as their affordable land where they can stick their dream home with the nice yard for the kids and the dog, and all those other thing people like that tend to spread things out? Should the government have interfered with all that just to spite the oil companies?

Anybody who bought an SUV can lick my hairy left testicle.

I’ve never bought an SUV so I think I’ll pass.

[reztrop]

Gas isn’t nearly expensive enough. If it was there wouldn’t be so much urban sprawl, so much traffic. Anybody who bought an SUV can lick my hairy left testicle.

Consumers are already switching to Toyotas and Hondas: Big Vehicles Stagger Under the Weight of $4 Gas

A fully loaded Ford F-250 pickup truck is a whole lot of vehicle. It can tow a horse trailer with multiple horses. It comes with a DVD-based navigation system for the driver as well as a DVD player for passengers who are sitting in the extended cab.

And how much does an F-250 set you back these days? Try $100,000.

Now, if you walked into a showroom today and asked to see one of these trucks, the price tag wouldn’t be anywhere near $100,000. It would be much closer to $50,000.

If gas remains near $4 a gallon, as many analysts expect, a big vehicle like the F-250 will cost $100,000 for an owner who keeps it for a typical amount of time (five years) and drives it a typical amount (15,000 miles a year). The gas alone would cost about $30,000, up from about $10,000 in the 1990s.

No wonder, then, that Americans are changing their driving habits so quickly. With sales plummeting, General Motors said Tuesday that it would stop making pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles at four of its North American plants.

The company is also considering selling its Hummer brand, an emblem of the megavehicle. Rick Wagoner, G.M.’s chairman, explained the moves by saying that he thought the shift toward more efficient cars was “by and large, permanent.”

Americans fell in love with vehicles like the Ford pickup trucks in the 1990s, back when gas didn’t cost much more than $1 a gallon. That seemed normal at the time, because gas prices had remained in a narrow range — roughly 90 cents to $1.25 a gallon — going back to the early 1980s.

Cheap gas made a highly desirable luxury item — hulking vehicles, with lots of power, a high view of the road and backseat DVD players — affordable for many families. The recent run-up in gas prices has changed that. On Tuesday, the nationwide average hit another record, $3.98 a gallon.

For more than two decades, Ford’s F-series pickup trucks have been the most popular line of vehicles in the country, selling more every year than any sedan, station wagon or S.U.V., foreign or domestic. But F-series sales have dropped more than 30 percent since last spring.

Last month, according to the new sales numbers released on Tuesday, the Toyota Corolla and Camry and the Honda Civic and Accord all surged past the F-series. It was the first month since December 1992 that a car — not a truck — was the country’s top-selling vehicle.

With gas expected to climb to $5 or more a gallon, you can say goodbye to the Big Three in Detroit. No bailouts from the federal government. They might as well kiss Al Gore’s hairy left testicle.

[bob]

@redandy

Economic downturn, possible recession, higher costs of transport, ripple effects. Also, why not just admit that people like their big cars that they can haul a soccer team around in, as well as their affordable land where they can stick their dream home with the nice yard for the kids and the dog, and all those other thing people like that tend to spread things out? Should the government have interfered with all that just to spite the oil companies?

No, they should have interferred with it to prevent economic downturn, possible recession, higher costs of transport, ripple effect etc. If the money collected on gasoline went to the government instead of the oil companies the money could have been used in ways that boosted the countries economy and made it less reliant on foriegn oil: rapid transit development projects, solar and wind development projects, home insulation subsidies etc.

Actually they should have interferred to prevent urban sprawl, wars over oil and global warming too. The suburbs are a dinosaur.

[redandy]

No, they should have interferred with it to prevent economic downturn, possible recession, higher costs of transport, ripple effect etc. They should have interferred to prevent urban sprawl, wars over oil and global warming too. The suburbs are a dinosaur.

Which is to say that basically you’d rather have the government tick a lot of people off by experimenting around trying to find some optimum price to solve problems that the market will solve in good time anyway.

[bob]

@redandy

No, they should have interferred with it to prevent economic downturn, possible recession, higher costs of transport, ripple effect etc. They should have interferred to prevent urban sprawl, wars over oil and global warming too. The suburbs are a dinosaur.

Which is to say that basically you’d rather have the government tick a lot of people off by experimenting around trying to find some optimum price to solve problems that the market will solve in good time anyway.

Solve? By sending massive profits to OPEC countries, mostly Saudia Arabia and Qatar I believe, and then borrowing hundreds (thousands - anybody?) of billions from the Chinese to run a war?

It’s like the American government has been “trying” to destroy it’s own people.

[redandy]

What, and letting Congress filter it out to their buddies while taking on enormous building projects that nobody wanted at the time does any better?

OPEC can only reap the rewards for so long. As reztrop already pointed out people are adjusting their habits. A gas tax, meanwhile, would likely be a permanent money dump into Congress and their buddies’ hands.

[wildcard]

The irony of it all (not so much irony) is that alternative fuels have been surpressed by the govt and oil cartels for decades. Read up on Daniel Dingel and Stan Meyer who both discovered how to seperate water into hydrogen and oxygen components using electolysis. Yes,a water powered car. Or the documentary,Who Killed the Electric Car? Or The Great American Streetcar Scandel from back in the mid 20th century. It boggles one’s mind knowing how many wars could have been avoided,how many lives could have been saved if there weren’t so many greedy ruthless people controlling this world.

[Mr_He]

Daniel Dingel’s car would appear to be a hoax, IE mainly running on gasoline. The car smells of petrol, however it has given him lots of publicity.

If a car running on water having the same ease of use as a gasoline ICE car was invented, the first auto company to bring it out would take over the world.

[wildcard]

Daniel Dingel’s car would appear to be a hoax, IE mainly running on gasoline. The car smells of petrol, however it has given him lots of publicity.

Quite possible or maybe disinfo.

If a car running on water having the same ease of use as a gasoline ICE car was invented, the first auto company to bring it out would take over the world.

The oil cartels do own the world so I don’t think they would let that happen any time soon.[/quote]

[bob]

@redandy

What, and letting Congress filter it out to their buddies while taking on enormous building projects that nobody wanted at the time does any better?

OPEC can only reap the rewards for so long. As reztrop already pointed out people are adjusting their habits. A gas tax, meanwhile, would likely be a permanent money dump into Congress and their buddies’ hands.

Look, people are entitled to do whatever business they like until the side effects of their business start to affect other people or until they start reaping extortionary profits. At that point you need government, you need laws, and you need taxes. We reached that point decades ago.

Imagine you have two neighbours. The one on the left desides he wants to sell stink bombs to the one on the right. The one on the right decides he wants to sell noise makers to the one on the left. Good business for them, not so good for you.

If I may change the topic a bit, have a look at Taiwan. The government here subsidize gas. What that means is that the people who walk, take transit, and just bloody well stay home are actually helping to “pay for” the gas used by the people who zoom around creating air pollution, noise, and a hazard to public safety. It is an outrageous state of affairs right on the very surface of it. People can argue for it because people can argue for whatever they think suits them

Ask anybody who lives in a city to name the one real crap situation they have to deal with daily. I bet half of them say “traffic”. For some the solution to that is more highways. For others the solution is smaller houses closer together, apartments, better mass transit and some mechanism to force people to quit fucking up our environment and now, it appears, our economy.

[Mr_He]

The oil majors as such don’t have enough oil, and they are trying to get new income streams going, IE a tacit admission that the future might not be in oil.

The main issue with the water driven car is that it does not run. The web sites I have seen are either sceptical or they are trying to sell you “secrets the oil majors don’t want you to know” for a mere US$97, which you can then sell on to your friends and make money!

easywatercar.com/2books.htm

It’s even claimed that one of the inventors was killed by the oil majors in order to keep his invention secret. A rather botched job as you can buy the secrets he died(?) for for US$97 - and make money to boot!

The water driven car is in violation of the first law of thermodynamics, which is even worse than the third rate sales pitch above.

I love the oxygen creating car, along with the assertion that oxygen in Tokyo is running out.

[bob]

There are hydrogen buses up and running. The problem is that they run by combining hydrogen with oxygen and in order to do that they need to seperate the hydrogen “from” the oxygen, and that requires an equal amount of energy as is produced when you put the two back together again. If your energy source is coal or some other carbon source you still create CO2 and all the rest of it. You don’t deposit all the rest of it in a cloud behind behind you the way car drivers do though. Also there is the possibility that the energy required to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen in the first place could come from hydro-electric projects or possibly, I suppose, some day, solar.

[redandy]

Look, people are entitled to do whatever business they like until the side effects of their business start to affect other people or until they start reaping extortionary profits. At that point you need government, you need laws, and you need taxes. We reached that point decades ago.

Imagine you have two neighbours. The one on the left desides he wants to sell stink bombs to the one on the right. The one on the right decides he wants to sell noise makers to the one on the left. Good business for them, not so good for you.

Yes, but we have nuisance law for that in which judges decide whether it’s unreasonable and then consider the appropriate remedy.

If I may change the topic a bit, have a look at Taiwan. The government here subsidize gas. What that means is that the people who walk, take transit, and just bloody well stay home are actually helping to “pay for” the gas used by the people who zoom around creating air pollution, noise, and a hazard to public safety. It is an outrageous state of affairs right on the very surface of it. People can argue for it because people can argue for whatever they think suits them

I agree. The government shouldn’t subsidize gas any more than they should tax it, that tends to encourage people to overuse gas, since they’re paying for it anyway through taxes on something else. A subsidy also goes beyond simply giving oil companies a level playing field. It tends to favor them over alternatives. That’s going too far.

Ask anybody who lives in a city to name the one real crap situation they have to deal with daily. I bet half of them say “traffic”. For some the solution to that is more highways. For others the solution is smaller houses closer together, apartments, better mass transit and some mechanism to force people to quit fucking up our environment and now, it appears, our economy.

True, and yet many, many of these people are still willing to move to the suburbs, for various reasons, such as better schools, safety, room for their kids to play, less noise, and all other sorts of reasons. The point is, if people were willing to take on the cost and the risk of increasing cost, why should the government have essentially taken the choice away from them?

(Sorry about the edit: the substance is the same but I wanted to clean up the grammar)

[bob]

@redandy

True, and yet many, many of these people are still willing to move to the suburbs, for various reasons, such as better schools, safety, room for their kids to play, less noise, and all other sorts of reasons. The point is, if people were willing to take on the cost and the risk of increasing cost, why should the government have essentially taken the choice away from them?

Because like it or not we are in this together. The people who decided to move to the suburbs and drive fifty miles a day are the ones who drove up the price of gas, and that drove up the price of everything for the rest of us. The tax charged on gas now doesn’t even pay for the price of highway construction and maintenance, and gas is bloody expensive. Oil companies are making such vast sums of money that even the republican government thought of imposing a windfall tax. You know things are getting truly obscene when that happens. Honestly, the whole thing is so preposterous I am amazed that there is any argument at all with what I’m saying. Isn’t it an absurd state of affairs when you need a car to escape the cars?

[redandy]

I got it, cars are evil, suburbs are evil, etc.

But guess what? Rail’s nice but it’s not a cure all. First of all, there are people out there that don’t live in cities, are they all supposed to just pack up and move then? Then there’s people in my situation who live in an area with one of the better rail systems in the U.S., but it can’t get you everywhere and even at today’s prices it’s usually cost and time effective to just drive (especially if I’ve got someone with me). Now I know you’ll bring up pollution, but what do you know, fuel efficient car sales are soaring these days. People are starting to phase out their inefficient cars for more efficient ones. Gas consumption was down by something like 11 million gallons last month, and the government didn’t have to do a thing. Meanwhile, if you want to find a way for more people to move back downtown, find a way to get the land/rent prices to drop. Oh, wait though, building rail there is going to cause the opposite to happen, and good luck raising a family in the high rises they’ll put along side it.

One note on the existing tax – I’m not sure why you would expect it to increase with the gas price. The tax is set at X cents/gallon (X = 38. something I think), so the more prices increase, the fewer gallons will be consumed and the less tax is collected – which is how it should be.

At any rate, reducing sprawl is a wonderful goal, and I’m all for it. You still, however, have got to consider people’s real world preferences in there somewhere. You can’t simply declare a certain lifestyle inviable when such a large portion of the population chooses that lifestyle.

[bob]

@redandy

… but what do you know, fuel efficient car sales are soaring these days. People are starting to phase out their inefficient cars for more efficient ones. Gas consumption was down by something like 11 million gallons last month, and the government didn’t have to do a thing.

But they could have done the same thing years ago, achieved the same result earlier “and” raised the revenue for mass transit, education, medical care, paying down the debt etc.

That’s the point.

My personal contention is that a gas tax should be used primarily to improve mass transit. Carrot and stick.

I’ve made that argument off and on for twenty years. A lot of other people have made similar arguments. Mostly we’ve been ignored. In that time the suburbs have sprawled in most cities around the world, the number of cars has increased, CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have increased, oil company profits have skyrocketed…

Might as well give up

[redandy]

Well, sorry I’m not convinced you get your bang for the buck with it. I don’t see any less sprawl in cities with rail then I do in cities without it. I saw a study about a year ago where they showed that the New York metro area with it’s widespread subways is actually more sprawling than the LA area. DC with it’s semi-widespread metro has just as much sprawl as San Fransisco. That’s not to say rail is never worthwhile – it may be for development purposes and property values or if the citizenry genuinely wants it and would use it – but it doesn’t necessarily reduce sprawl.

Go ahead & give up, I’m about done with this too.