Quote:
Originally Posted by 58robbo
I have read several posts whingeing about high gas prices. it's big oils fault for profiteering! it's the governements fault for overtaxing! it's the feds fault for devaluing the dollar! it's opecs fault for being greedy! it's environmentalists fault for protesting against wildlife preserve exploration! it's speculators fault for creating false demand! the Chinese and Indians are to blame for giving up their bicycles to buy cars! it's george bush's fault! blah blah blah yadda yadda yadda
whenever i'm in the states i seem to come across a large number of grossly oversized vehicles. a large number of these have US flags brandished across them in some shape or form. a large percentage of their owners sport flags outside their homes. to me this is all a big con. those people aren't patriots, they're traitors!
Guilty of bankrupting the US and financing Al Qaeda, they should be flying saudi flags instead!
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58robbo, it's about time that you got some realities straight about America and its differences with Britain.
Britain, as I understand it from the stories my dad relates to me from his family in England and Ireland, is governmentally messed up. Y'all still have a useless monarchy that you refuse to disband... come on, having a Queen and countless Princes is good for press and publicity, but in the end they really don't have any real power anymore... and yet you still support this monarchy through your taxes. You also have socialized medicine, supported through taxes (such as gas taxes)... I don't know that I'd want to be in a country where everyone could go to the doctor for free as soon as they discover a hangnail. That'd make the waiting line longer for people who are truly sick... and that waiting line is long enough in America.
Comparatively speaking, Britain is a small country... with twice the land area of my home state of Pennsylvania, but five times the population. Everything in Britain is packed tighter than it is in Pennsylvania... and it has always been that way. Britain ranks #1 in "number of registered vehicles per 100 miles of motorable road".
Now, I've never been to Britain. I have, however, watched every last Monty Python episode ever recorded. Many of those episodes have scenes where you see the road in some area of Britain... even as far back as the early 1970s, from what I can see, British people drove small cars. This is because gas has ALWAYS been very expensive, comparatively, in Britain.
My family never had an SUV or a truck. We always had a mid-sized car with which to haul the family, and my dad had a compact car he used as his regular runabout. So, bear in mind that I'm not just standing on a soapbox because I drive a Suburban. I don't.
America is a gigantic country, and our tax structure has kept gas comparatively cheap for decades. America was oil-independent until 1950, by which time many cars were on the road. We were already addicted to the car... and specifically, LARGE cars... by 1950. Sure, there were people who couldn't afford more than a VW bug, and those drivers probably had a higher incidence of car accident deaths than drivers of Cadillacs. So, you see, because America is so big, and things are not as tightly packed in America as they are in Britain, people have to drive. Cheap gas lured people away from crime-infested, filthy cities and toward more pleasant suburbs. Who wants to live in a crime-infested, filthy city anyway?
People who drove Suburbans in the late 1990s when gas was 95 cents per gallon were not accused of being guilty of treason. We were awash in cheap gas, probably because OPEC wanted to get us seriously addicted to these huge SUVs and stuff before they restricted supply to run up the price of their oil. Nobody ever complained about SUV drivers as being environmentally or economically poisonous.
All of a sudden, now that the OPEC countries from halfway around the world want to keep their oil expensive, AMERICAN SUV drivers are guilty of treason? I've got news for you... many of them are trying to get rid of their SUVs. If you read our news, you'll see that many car dealerships are no longer accepting large SUVs in trade because they know they won't be able to sell them.
Sometimes I think that Big Oil could give back some of its excessive profit to the American public... but really, they don't have to. Americans are telling Big Oil "we WILL buy your gas for $4/gallon"... so why should Big Oil take pity on us? Believe me, I don't like high gas prices... and I don't own any energy stocks. This is just simple capitalism. The market has said "we will bear this price for gasoline". Big Oil COULD give back some of its profits, but is under no requirement to do so.
OPEC is indeed being greedy. They COULD pump more oil... that is a known fact... they just choose not to. They say the market isn't demanding it... well, that's a load and everyone knows it. They're out there, smugly laughing about how crude oil will "soon be supplied to the market at $200/barrel"... don't tell me they're not to blame. If they opened the taps more, the price of oil would come down and that is a provable fact. Yes, supply and demand drives oil prices. But when supply is kept artificially low, naturally that will make the market price increase.
Our government doesn't tax fuel that much. I hate all taxes, but in the end, we don't have very high fuel taxes. I just want to know that that money is going exactly where it should be going... to maintain and improve federal roads and other infrastructure. People who use the roads should pay for the roads... it's that simple. They won't be built and maintained for free.
The environmentalists are largely to blame as well... Democrats in general hold a lot of blame for lack of American oil exploration. It's a well-known fact that America has very large oil reserves... some people speculate that we have one of the world's absolute largest oil reserves in Alaska... but the environmentalists all scream whenever anyone dares to talk about drilling for oil in Alaska or off of our coasts or whatever. God forbid that some esoteric Arctic seal should be driven to extinction by our drilling for oil... oh no... I'd bet that if you polled 100 average Americans about what they care about more... the Arctic seal population or gas prices... you could count on one hand the number of 'em who would say the Arctic seal population. (And on top of all of this, there's no guarantee that oil drilling would drive species to extinction.) I'd wager that the OPEC blankety-blanks are over there laughing at us because they know they have us by the short hairs... and they find it downright hilarious that we're doing nothing about it. If we drilled for our own oil, we could tell OPEC to shove it. Yet, we don't do that. Instead, we finance both sides of the war on terrorism.
The Chinese and Indians are not to blame for gas prices. America is to blame for that as well. We have shipped millions of our jobs to China and India, we buy all kinds of cheap Chinese-made crap, and then we wonder why it is that these countries are experiencing robust economic growth which enables their citizenry to trade bicycles for cars. The only thing that China and India do which affects the price of gas is they subsidize gas... but in the end, SOMEONE has to pay for it whether it's the government (read: the people, through their taxes) or the people.
Speculators? They can't do much. I used to blame them too, but the truth is that none of them ever take delivery of oil. Any oil they buy, they must eventually sell. You never see a big tank truck pulling up to a Wall Street investment firm, telling the doorman "Here's 1,000 barrels of crude oil, as per your order last month, and we have 99 more of these trucks on the way... where do you want us to put the stuff?". They aren't taking any oil off of the market... they just hold the oil contracts in hopes that they will be more valuable later. If they're not, the investment companies MUST sell them at a loss because they have no desire for real crude oil.
The Feds, and devaluing the dollar? Look, you talk about how sooner or later OPEC is going to realize that it's getting nothing but paper for its oil... well, what the heck do you think your currency is? Is the pound linked to any precious metal or commodity? I agree that our currency is just glorified worthless paper, but I don't think there are many countries anymore (if any) which still have their currencies directly linked to a precious commodity. Chances are, your pound notes (or whatever denominations you have) are glorified worthless paper also.
Yes, some Americans are wasteful. I could be accused of being one. I have a 1976 Ford Thunderbird that I drive when I can... it's a gigantic old lead-sled which gets comparatively poor gas mileage. Do I NEED to be driving that size car, when it's just me and I'm not hauling any people or equipment? That depends. I was in an accident a while back, with a car of similar size. Having been driving that size car saved me from serious injury and the cop said so himself. So, perhaps it's personal injury insurance that I'm buying when I spend an arm and a leg to fill up my big beast of a car. I will trade down for a smaller car when everyone else does. It's easy enough for someone in Britain to buy a small car, because most people drive small cars and therefore you're at a comparatively lower risk of sustaining severe injuries in a two-car accident when you drive a small car in Britain than you are when you drive a small car in America. When everyone else drives a smaller car, I would not be at the same risk of injury if I drove a small car... so at that point, I would get a smaller car. Until then, I only live once... and I will protect my body.
Yes, Americans are addicted to oil and their large cars... and it's going to take a long time for us to get off of that addiction. Many of us are trying... some just don't care, because they can afford it. Such is the way of a capitalist society. I don't think someone needs to be doing a one-person 100-mile daily commute in a Suburban, but if they can afford it and they have reasons for wanting to use a Suburban rather than something else, who are we to tell them they can't?
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), but the mileage they get, or rather don't. I think it's somewhat ironic that there is so much complaining about American gas prices at the moment (which, by the way, are minute in comparison with what we have over here) yet people still choose to drive things with enormous tanks that drink fuel like an alchoholic drinks liquor. I like the idea of hybrid SUVs because it gives people the best of both worlds but unfortunately they're more expensive than regular SUVs so it's unlikely they'll catch on fast. Also, there aren't enough available on the market here in Europe so the majority of big passenger vehicles driving around our roads are still using loads of fuel.
- If motor vehicles would run on regenerating energy from within this thread and the Saudi royal family would have a different fate.
