Just a Coincidence????

[Tim Liston]

The other day I saw mentioned that the Iraq war is costing the U.S. about $140 billion a year, including reconstruction costs.

I wondered, how many gallons of gasoline/diesel do we consume in the U.S. every year. Did a little googling (!?) and found the answer.

About 140 billion gallons....

Seems to me a buck a gallon gas tax would fully pay for the war AND reduce our need to wage it.

(I know, I know, it's not about oil, it's about democracy....)

[Jeff Endress]

[Stephen Eisel]

What is so significant about this number 19? just sayin

[ryan costa]

in all the speeches they say the war is about defending "our way of life".

"our way of life" essentially means a lot of motoring and commuting and stuff. Directly raising the price of gasoline to pay for a war over oil would attract too much attention and thought over that "our way of life" phrase. It would be a waste of a perfectly good phrase.

[Phil Florian]

I think this is a peachy idea. I either read this or heard on NPR recently an interesting point. This is the first war in our history where the American people were not asked to make sacrifices to help with the war effort. I don't mean the soldiers and such or their families. I am talking everyone else. Where are the calls to reduce the use of metals so that we have enough to make bombs and stuff? Where are the calls for us to buy war bonds to help pay for the effort? Where are the tax increases? We are actually asked to do the opposite by this administration...live like normal, soak up gas like gravy on biscuits and go on with our lives.

The bigger point was that this will be the first war the US has engaged in (and I don't know if this is true) that won't be paid for by the generation that started it. Interesting point. Will it take a "tax and spend" democrat in the WH to make up for the "Spend and spend" Republican we have now?

[ryan costa]

Motoring is the universal narcotic. There will be no intervention.

Where are the tax and spend Republicans of yesteryear? The Ike Eisenhowers. The Richard Nixons. The Gerald Fords.

[Tim Liston]

When I wrote the above post I started to write about what Phil has said, and how unfair it is that we're handing the bill for the Iraq war to our children, and their children. Stinks I think. But my posts tend to get lengthy so I didn't.

The bill for the war should be paid primarily by those who benefit, and that would be petroleum users (gasoline and diesel). That's all of us, some more some less. The federal government already collects modest gas taxes, it would cost nothing in addition enact a larger gas tax.

I posted about this topic well over a year ago and got a gusher (!) of “a gas tax would be unfairâ€Â

[ryan costa]

The good news for most of the people with influence over policy is that they are over 40. that means they'll be dead before things get really bad. Barring a pileup of droughts and floods and crop failures.

As oil gets increasingly scarce, their mortgages will be already paid off and stuff. Even if things are only half as gloomy as James Kunstler suspects they can get, they'll be ok, or at least old enough to die without dying tragically young.

Today is all about the cargo cult and the motoring. We get the Cargo from Asia and the factories we pay to build down south. We pay them with dollars, and they loan those dollars back to us to pay for wars and to buy more cargo.

The infinite growth premise of Globalism is impossible, therefore Globalism is impossible. in the interim America has gone on Mr.Toad's wild ride. We've ghettoized our cities. The suburbs are incubators of neo-rednecks and vapid tv addicts.

Our friends the Saudis showcase a society in which a majority of the population sympathize with the 9/11 terrorists, who were also Saudis. They fulfill the promise of Globalism: Although the male population of citizens is unemployed in the double digits, there are hundreds of thousands or millions of temporary foreign workers. Once most Chinese have tv and internets and stuff substantial violent, revolutionary, or doomsday-like ideologies will spring up. Once they realize they are never going to have it as good as the average American tv family had it in the 1960s.

[ryan costa]

Civilization is an endurance sport. A modern civilization has to pace itself or it will hit the wall pretty fast.

The free trade dogma propped up by so much superstition and assumptions has come with massive structural change. That structural change costs more than your saving with the outsourcing, so there's no point to it but for throwing bones to the third world and generating a few icons of big fast money in America. Most of those "beneficial" structural changes are unsustainable and due to peter out. There won't be, or shouldn't be, any more ex-urban development. No more new highways and big shopping centers. Agriculture will gradually become 5 times more labor intensive. 80 percent of fast food places will gradually disappear.

The idea that everyone should prepare for college will be realized for what it is: ridiculous. If the purpose of schools is the prepare the next generation to meet the needs of our society, it is obvious 20 percent of the graduates don't need to stay in school longer than the average illegal immigrant or legal blue collar immigrant had. No Child Left Behind is another bad Bush idea.

Returning to the traditional value of Protectionism may cost some U.S. jobs. mostly jobs in Retail and Advertising and some sectors of education and TV entertainment. This is more structural adjustment. Jobs in the factories, mills, fields, and short and mid range trucking may pick up. Construction of rail will probably pick up, so that probably means more engineering and white collar jobs.

I rode by the metrohealth hospital between west 25th and Scranton today. It was shocking that thousands of people are in and out of there everyday. Yet the storefronts along west 25th are half barren. Most of the houses would sell for under 100 grand. In any other developed country you would probably find a lot of restaurants, sandwich shops, small grocery and convenience stores, cafes, taverns, bars, whatever, next to such a place. There aren't. There aren't even pharmacies. And that's the ultimate destination of most of America on the path of turbo-capitalism and globalism: you keep building more bubbles, and the previous bubbles become "ghetto".

The idea of retiring to the Sunbelt will shrink up considerably. Most of the Sunbelt was built during the years of peak motoring: It is simply too expensive to return it to more traditional scales.

The hubris of trying to turn the rest of the world into some democracy happyland will gradually be realized. That will stop. There will be more genocides in Africa, and probably a few civil wars or bloodbaths in Asia. We'll need the armed forces to quell violent outbreaks by dissatisfied American TV addicts, neo-rednecks and "urban" youth.