More on Energy... and start taking your Smart Pills

I'm directing the next sentence of this blog to my mother, who I know is reading this: Mom, both you and dad need to stop thinking that the next election rests on what Fox News says or on what the next president will do about preserving the status quo on healthcare, and read this Op-Ed by Thomas Friedman in today's NY Times.

In case you hadn't heard, McCain and now Clinton are both supporting a "gas-tax holiday," whereby the 18.4 cents per gallon federal tax on gasoline would be suspended during the summer. McCain has no offset for how to pay for it, so really he is going to borrow from the Chinese just like his mentor, President Bush. Clinton wants to charge a windfall profits tax on the oil companies, which is only slightly better. At least she's trying to find a way to offset the loss to the government budget. But the tax has the opposite effect; it causes oil companies to shift profits to their foreign operations because those aren't taxed.

I'm not going to paraphrase Mr. Friedman because he just put it so well:

This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.

When the summer is over, we will have increased our debt to China, increased our transfer of wealth to Saudi Arabia and increased our contribution to global warming for our kids to inherit.

No, no, no, we’ll just get the money by taxing Big Oil, says Mrs. Clinton. Even if you could do that, what a terrible way to spend precious tax dollars — burning it up on the way to the beach rather than on innovation?

Do Americans really want to drive their SUVs to the beach just to put their heads in the sand?

As I said earlier, it's less consumption we're after, not more. Repealing the tax, however temporary, would reveal the government to be the world's greatest enabler. "Gee, I know we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, but we can't kill their summer vacations when gas is $4 a gallon! Let's make it $3.82. That'll give the people what they need!"

I think the government needs to go to a Codependents Anonymous meeting. And we consumers need some kind of program of our own too.

It's the Math, Stupid! or How the Gas Tax Holiday Won't Help You

When I heard last week about McCain's proposed "Gas Tax Holiday," I knew it was a ploy to buy votes. At that time, I wasn't sure how much the federal gas tax was -- maybe 50 cents a gallon? When I found out that it was only 18.4 cents a gallon, I just laughed out loud.

This "holiday" is supposed to last just three months, from Memorial Day to Labor Day. So just do the math; I'll use my family as an example. When I fill up I usually add about 15 gallons to my car; my wife about 18. I fill up weekly, she fills up semi-weekly. For me, that's 15 tanks of gas (adding two extra tanks for additional summer driving); for her, 8.5 tanks. So...

Me: 15 tanks X 15 gallons = 225 gallons X $0.184 = $41.40 in savings
Lisa: 8.5 tanks X 18 gallons = 153 gallons X $0.184 = $28.15 in savings

That's $69.55 in savings for my family. This would be enough for us to buy groceries, or pay our electricity/water/sanitation bill, for 4-5 days. In my opinion, a good amount of savings would be about $200 for the summer. This would require a family with two cars to buy 1,087 gallons of gas over the summer. With an average gas mileage of, say, 25 miles a gallon, that would mean that a family of four would have to log 27,175 miles on the roads this summer. I don't know about you, but it takes me a year and a half to drive that much.

I brought this up with my father (a Fox News Republican who voted twice for Bill Clinton, by the way), and he said that $100 was a good amount of savings. But we've all been joking for weeks about how little the economic stimulus package passed by Congress will do for the economy. But $200 in savings? No voter's going to cast his vote for someone over a $200 savings, and if he is, then he's agreeing to be bought for $200. He would be even more stupid than I thought, and I think he's pretty stupid already. McCain (and now Hillary Clinton, who has jumped on his bandwagon) is engaging in nothing more than political games-playing. Sure, it sounds good, but it'll do nothing really to help anyone.

Bravo, Thomas Frank

Fantastic piece in today's Wall Street Journal Online by Thomas Frank (no, not the ballplayer recently cut from the Toronto Blue Jays because he was old and tired out). Thomas Frank is the author of "What's the Matter with Kansas?" and other books. In that book, Frank points out how the Republican Party went from being the party of aristocrats who were in the minority, to being the most dominant political party of the modern era by transforming themselves into the party of the people, the buddy of the working man. George W. Bush was the candidate you most wanted to drink a beer with. Huh? Ivy-League educated W? Sober George?

But think about how this was done. The rise of angry white men in the media: Rush, Hannity, O'Reilly, Savage, Drudge, Dobbs. None of these guys would be sitting down in a local bar yucking it up with the hard-hats of the world. No, they prefer sipping scotch and smoking cigars in the tony clubs of the Beltway and Manhattan, rubbing elbows with industrialists, lobbyists, hedge fund managers, and the other rich folks with whom they now identify themselves.

And, Frank writes, look where it's gotten those beer drinkers and hard hats: massive government deregulation, attempts to privatize Social Security, the Clear Channel and News Corp monopolies of mass media, Welfare Reform, "free trade" that sent their jobs to Asia and Mexico, the Wal-Martization of middle America whereby being represented by a labor union meant that you were un-American. As most intelligent pundits said after the 2004 election -- the GOP got the middle class to vote en masse against their own self-interest and security. They created a bogey-man in the Muslim, scaring them into giving up their civil liberties as being a patriotic act when it was in fact just the opposite. Created the fallacy that "either you're with us or you're with the terrorists."

And now this machine, this fantastically organized machine, has gotten a Democrat to try to eat one of its own! Barack Obama's comments that have led to "Bittergate" were certainly clumsy, embarrassing, simplistic, and overly generalized, but what they were not was elitist. As if Obama, rather than the Crown Royal-drinking, squirrel hunting, $100 million-earning townie named Hillary Clinton, were now the aristocrat.

Beautiful quote from the Frank op-ed:

If Barack Obama or anyone else really cares to know what I think, I will simplify it all down to this. The landmark political fact of our time is the replacement of our middle-class republic by a plutocracy. If some candidate has a scheme to reverse this trend, they've got my vote, whether they prefer Courvoisier or beer bongs spiked with cough syrup. I don't care whether they enjoy my books, or would rather have every scrap of paper bearing my writing loaded into a C-47 and dumped into Lake Michigan. If it will help restore the land of relative equality I was born in, I'll fly the plane myself.

But has Frank shown us his idealistic knickers? Is this country really that "land of relative equality?" Maybe when I was a kid and hadn't experienced the world and all it has to offer. But now I tend to be a little cynical about this myself. Perhaps the Republicans managed to reveal what this country truly is: a boiling cauldron of provincial, culturally ignorant, violent, hateful swine. We are people who couldn't care less about America's standing in the world. Who would just as soon shoot a Muslim as engage him in meaningful dialogue. Who lack the patience to understand anything beyond the headlines that pass through our vacuous heads every 22 minutes. Bill Maher makes jokes about how stupid Americans really are, but we all know that in every joke is a kernel of truth, the size of which varies on how biting the joke is. To have ceded responsibility for our national intelligence to a bunch of superstitious Christianists who believe the universe is only 20,000 years old, we have to be pretty fucking stupid.

I've worked for nearly seven years at the same company, and I have met and talked with hundreds of its employees in that time. I can literally count on one hand how many of them have actually read the Constitution and can tell me what the Fifth Amendment says. That doesn't necessarily mean that they other several thousand I haven't met are troglodytes, but for the most part, it painfully obvious what most people are interested in. They are most interested in what they're going to do the next weekend, or what's on their DVRs (a-ha, but read my iPod post below, I'm such a hypocrite!), or how their local sports teams are doing in the standings. Their deepest contact with world affairs occurs weekly at the gas station, as they drive up and see how many more cents per gallon they'll pay for gas, and they weigh the option of downgrading to a lower octane even though they know their mileage deteriorates. It then ends once they re-start their cars after filling up, and their endless musical soundtrack blares once again from their car speakers.