Political Irony

10 Comments

1. Mad Hatter wrote:

   This highlights one of many reasons that I’m Anti-Republican. The party worships at the altar of unfettered free market capitalism which simply cannot factor in the total true cost of any business. Social costs, which tend to be ignored by most businesses (they just don’t show up in their ledgers), must be dealt with politically with appropriate and effective regulation. We cannot as a nation leave these regulations up to the states…the federal government (of the PEOPLE) must do this.

   You Tea Partiers out there…how can your smaller government deal with this? Are you sure you want to return to the days when some of our rivers were catching fire?

   Wednesday, June 16, 2010 at 9:36 am | Permalink
2. Jonah wrote:

   Until alternative energy becomes cheaper we are stuck with oil. If a push is made to use more alternative energy sources right now, the end result will certainly be higher unemployment due to smaller corporate profits. All we can hope for at this point is that more money is spent on research on making cleaner alternative energy cheaper so we can slowly wean ourselves off oil.

   Wednesday, June 16, 2010 at 10:40 am | Permalink
3. ebdoug wrote:

   100 years ago, people traveled by train. A few cars. People managed. Look what we have done to our planet in 100 years. The Internet is a wonderful alternative to energy use. (I may be wrong here as I really don’t know how much energy the Internet uses.)

   Wednesday, June 16, 2010 at 11:02 am | Permalink
4. Iron Knee wrote:

   Personally, I’d be happy if we just took the first step and removed all the subsidies we taxpayers give to the oil industry, so that the price of oil reflected its true cost (even without adding in social costs and other externals). That would definitely stimulate the production of alternative energy sources.

   Wednesday, June 16, 2010 at 11:12 am | Permalink
5. Falkelord wrote:

   @Ebdoug, the difference there is that when people travel, they still use cars. No one goes on a “virtual vacation” or uses the internet to visit destinations they once used trains for.

   the internet doesn’t power cars or any device for that matter, but rather allows better communication. think the telephone. two separate arenas. think of the internet as an amalgamation of every single computer hooked up to it. 🙂

   Wednesday, June 16, 2010 at 12:15 pm | Permalink
6. Mike wrote:

   $6/gallon. Sad but true. We’re talking about addicts here.

   Wednesday, June 16, 2010 at 2:49 pm | Permalink
7. ebdoug wrote:

   The question is how much energy does the Internet save? I know my son, rather than fly to Europe to meet with the rest of his team or potential customers, meets with them on the Web. I’m now spending time with my grandchildren on Skype rather than the long journey. I go to the beach in Maine every single day. No travel. No bugs. (in my case, no cigarette smoke to put me into asthma attacks) A virtual vacation every day. I’m really just asking. http://www.oldorchardbeachwebcam.com/seacoastcam.html

   Friday, June 18, 2010 at 5:51 am | Permalink
8. Anonymous wrote:

   “Personally, I’d be happy if we just took the first step and removed all the subsidies we taxpayers give to the oil industry, so that the price of oil reflected its true cost (even without adding in social costs and other externals). That would definitely stimulate the production of alternative energy sources.”

   I agree and am glad to see Iron Knee believes in markets 🙂

   Note that 1/5 to 1/6 of the cost of a gallon of gas is already direct tax. http://www.api.org/statistics/fueltaxes/upload/GASOLINE_TAX_MAP_APRIL2010.pdf

   Friday, June 18, 2010 at 10:07 am | Permalink
9. Iron Knee wrote:

   hee hee, I DEFINITELY believe in markets. IF something can be done using a free and open market (and that’s a significant IF) then it is always more efficient to do so. Unfortunately, there are lots of things that prevent things from being a free and open market (objects for which the price is not elastic, such as medical care, and lack of competition, such as utilities and monopolies).

   We already saw this — when the price of gas hit $4/gallon and it looked like it might keep rising, there was a burst of investment in alternative energy and fuels.

   Note that the statistic quoted by Anonymous (that 1/5 of the cost of gas is tax) may be true but it is very misleading. Most gas taxes go to pay for roads and highways. Your automobile would be virtually worthless if there weren’t any roads to drive on.

   In fact, gas taxes and car registration fees only pay 51% of road construction costs. The rest is paid out of income, sales, property tax, and bond issues. So here is another example of how we subsidize the true cost of driving our oil fed automobiles. See http://subsidyscope.com/transportation/highways/funding/

   Also found an interesting quote from Donald Lubick, who was the US Treasury’s Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy, who said that the petroleum industry “probably has larger tax incentives relative to its size than any other industry in the country”. Estimates place the subsidies received by the oil and gas industry in the US at between $15 and $35 billion.

   Friday, June 18, 2010 at 11:08 am | Permalink
10. Anonymous wrote:

    “Note that the statistic quoted … may be true but it is very misleading. Most gas taxes go to pay for roads and highways. Your automobile would be virtually worthless if there weren’t any roads to drive on.”

    More true for diesel taxes and registration fees than gas taxes, a lot goes to state general revenue funds as well. But yeah, the only thing that leads to effective conservation and innovation is cost. Something like Al Gore’s carbon tax = political suicide though.

    Gasoline has dropped $.30/gal since the DWH spill started. Speakin of irony 🙂

    Friday, June 18, 2010 at 3:52 pm | Permalink