Guest Commentary : A glass half full and leaking
Posted on Tuesday, May 6, 2008
The outlook isn't bright for the home team these days. Housing prices are plunging but you can't buy because the bank is afraid to lend you the money because you can't sell the house you already own, which depresses prices even further. Prices are rising, the dollar keeps falling, the stock market is tanking and there's talk of a downsizing at your shop.
Is it any wonder polls are finding that people's confidence in their economic future is way down ? Their confidence in the present isn't so hot either. But I am not a glass-half-empty kind of guy. I believe in keeping a positive attitude. And so I offer a ray of sunshine to illuminate the Bush Gloom The price of oil reached $ 117-a-barrell the other day and gasoline at a California station passed $ 4-a-gallon. That may prove to be our salvation. Here's how It will, at long last, force people to use less gasoline. We of the elitist minority long have begged you of the gas-guzzling majority to use public transit, give up your SUVs, form car pools, walk. Expense aside, you are fouling the very air we breathe and visiting an environmental catastrophe on your children and your children's children.
You ignored us. Worse than that, you scorned us. I remember, six years ago or so, when I suggested a $ 2-a-gallon gas tax to encourage conservation (gas was then $ 2-a-gallon, give or take ) I was pilloried, shunned at the better diners. Opponents warned of economic disaster.
I answered that at least the money would go into the U. S. Treasury where it could be used to cushion the economic impact of the price hike. No one listened.
Now $ 4 gas has arrived at our doorstep all on its own, the difference being that the extra two bucks goes into the pockets of our friends in Iran, Venezuela and al-Qaida instead of ours. So be it.
But the positive impact will be the same • A population that uses resources more efficiently.
• A healthier population, one that shops for food more carefully since it will have less money to shop with.
• Vegetarianism will grow because at these prices farmers will find it far more profitable to grow corn for fuel rather than food, making beef too expensive for normal (that is to say, poor ) people to buy. Vegetarianism is healthy so we will have fewer heart attacks, less obesity, lower food bills.
That's the good side. The downside is that our economy - already spiraling toward recession - will collapse. The house of cards that is our prosperity is based on war, cheap fuel and selling each other our houses. We're going to be left with only war to sustain us.
Can't be helped. If you're going to make an omelet, be prepared to break and egg or two. Do not expect the government to do anything serious about any of this. The people who govern us are not serious people.
George W. Bush has been a particularly outrageous disaster. Everything he's done has made the situation worse, from destabilizing Iraq and the oil supply in the Middle East, to extending tax breaks to oil companies already groaning under the burden of windfall profits.
In addition, he has proposed ending the federal subsidy to Amtrak, making us even more dependent on cars and planes. (The subsidy, by the way, is $ 1. 67 billion a year, about half a week's worth of the Iraq war. ) He has also proposed shifting $ 3. 2 billion in the federal transportation bill from mass transit to highways. John McCain isn't any better. He wants to suspend the 18. 4-cent-a-gallon federal gas tax from Memorial Day to Labor Day, to make gasoline cheaper. This at a time when we have highway bridges falling down from lack of maintenance.
Fortunately, we don't have to depend on Washington to enforce sanity upon us. The market will make us do the right thing.
Are you having fun yet ? Don't worry, you will.
Donald Kaul is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-losing Washington correspondent who, by his own account, is right more than he's wrong.
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