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If current prices remain for a while (or go up), most people will be forced to re-think their wasteful ways.
So you say you support high gas prices....Ok..and you say you support higher taxes on the higher gas prices...OK ??...now please justify the...
High profits on the HIGH fuel prices.
Is this our medicine, punishment or is it just plain "conditioning" to get us to all drive less, save more, waste not? Who put corporate America in charge of teaching the American public a lesson on Energy Conservation????!!!
I think you may have misunderstood my views. I have long been in favor of higher gas taxes, but the politicians of both parties failed to enact the higher taxes. Now that the world oil prices have skyrocketed, I don't think we need to boost gas taxes as much.
When gas prices fell to $0.609/gal in 1986, THAT's when the nickel or dime each year gas tax increase would have been a good idea.
Had the politicians voted for a nickel or dime increase each year, the cumulative effect would have likely prevented people from considering such wasteful vehicles.
About the high profits: Most big oil companies own huge oil reserves, plus they buy oil on the open market to refine and sell. They bought those oil reserves when oil was cheap, so it's logical that their profits would skyrocket when oil went from $10-$12 in 1998-1999 to $75 the other day. Buy Low, Sell High. Nothing evil or sinister about that.
Huge profits don't anger me. It's the whole goal of free enterprise.
Microsoft's profit margin has been about 40% - 60% of its revenues for many years now. Same at other tech firms. Dell's profits have been huge, and their stock has done very well. Some companies have long histories of consistent profits. In my house, profits don't equal evil.
You asked who put Corporate America in charge of teaching us about energy conservation. My opinion is that the politicians, both Democrat and Republican, did it by failing to enact real measures to encourage conservation (as discussed above re: gas taxes).
Ever since 1973, our federal politicians have dreamed up well-meaning but completely ineffective incentives to drive less and conserve energy, like the federal fuel economy vehicle standards (CAFE?). They worked, sort of. The average vehicle now achieves about double the MPG of the typical 1973 vehicle.
Problem is, lotsa people have bought fuel efficient cars like Toyotas, Nissans and Hondas, and then they move farther away from where they work, and thus burn as much (or more) gas than they did 20 or more years ago. Urban sprawl continues in many locations. Tulsa and Dallas/Fort Worth are prime examples. Land has been relatively cheap, and there's been no financial incentives to stay close to the jobsite.
I live in Los Angeles, home to millions of hypocritical Democrats (and a few Greedy Republicans, like myself) who talk a good game about the evils of SUVs and wasteful gas consumption, and yet buy them and drive them like there's no tomorrow.
Yesterday, while dropping my kids off at school, a friend with an Excursion (that's one big-ass truck) was driving a crappy old economy beater. I asked "Where's the big Ford?" The answer: "Parked it due to $120 fillups that last only a week." (FWIW, it's one of the few vehicles that sported Bush/Cheney bumper stickers last fall.)
I don't deny that there will be short-term pain (maybe even long-term pain) from higher energy prices. We should have started down this road in 1986 when oil prices collapsed. But both political parties failed us miserably, and now we have the Chinese, the Indians, and the people of the former USSR (total population of over 2.7 billion people in those three regions) competing with us for oil. And those people are just beginning to use it the way we always have. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that increased demand equals higher prices. For most of my life, it's been cheap. Cheaper than milk. Cheaper than beer. Too damn cheap, IMO. That's changing now, and I hope the change is permanent.
