Author:
Ned Depew
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Date Posted: 10:46:39 10/14/05 Fri
Gwen -
While any relief from the high cost of gas (and more importantly perhaps, home heating oil) would be welcome, what the County Supervisors could do, would (at most) be cosmetic, amounting to less than a quarter per gallon.
The real story here is price gouging. It is undeniable that prices took a sharp jump long before any shortages that had to be replenished with higher-priced product emerged. Oil companies and distributors who had been selling gas for around $2.15/gallon one day boosted it up to $2.50 and then over $3 within fourteen days - while still selling the product that they had purchased (or manufactured) at a cost that allowed them to make a comfortable profit at the $2.15/gallon price.
We saw a similar phenomenon in the 1972 oil embargo and subsequent price spikes. But at that time we had a responsible President, who was a man of integrity and didn't have strong ties of self-interest to the Oil Cartel.
Jimmy Carter moved swiftly to impose a "Windfall Profits Tax" on oil companies and distributors, to remove their incentive to drive prices ever higher. He also instituted a comprehensive energy plan that would have made the US energy independent by 2000, if it hadn't been dismantled by the Reagan and Bush I administrations (and ignored by Clinton).
If Carter's plan had been implemented, cars would have been getting 50MPG or better by 2000 - the SUV boondoggle would have been avoided - alternative energy sources would have been developed in earnest (instead of suppressed) using the clout of Federal Government energy research dollars in a big way - for peaceful purposes.
Carter actually styled this program the "moral equivalent of war" and asked US citizens to join together behind it - and even make some "sacrifices" to achieve energy independence - as we traditionally have banded together during war time for the common good. If we had done so, the whole "oil Crisis" and the backbone of justification for Gulf Wars™ I and II would not have existed.
What I'm saying by this brief history lesson is that not much can be done on the County level that will have lasting effects. The County Supes would do better to pass a resolution demanding both a rigorous investigation - by Elliot Spitzer at least, and at the national level - of Oil Company pricing practices (which when closely examined bear no relation to the traditional "market force" bogeymen of "supply and demand") and the institution of a Windfall Profits tax.
In the long run it is not taxes, but obscene profits being extorted by oil companies and their subsidiaries in distribution that is causing these price rises. In European countries high gasoline taxes have the double value of restricting consumption of gasoline (and spurring production of fuel efficient vehicles) and providing funds for national and international public transportation that is model of efficiency and comfort.
That was what was intended for our gasoline taxes initially, but now they only go into the DOT general funds, and are mostly spent for more and more motor vehicle roads - leading to increased vehicle usage, increased fossil-fuel consumption and increased air pollution! The worst of all possible worlds!
I think that course for the Supervisors would be much more useful - to educate the voters to how the federal government is allowing oil companies to rob us and to our complete lack of a comprehensive energy plan that actually deals with the issue of diminishing oil supplies - than short term relief of a few cents per gallon at the pump.
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