Gas Prices in the United States

The wheels haven't fallen off the British or the Canadain economic recovery because of high petrol prices

INB 4 Someone says "America is country where most of it is isolated". Do you know how badly parts of Northern England and Scotland are?

All of England is smaller than the state of Georgia alone. And the population density is over 7 times as high.

edited 25th Aug '11 5:26:21 AM by storyyeller

^ This. Nobody on the British Isles can claim something is "isolated" compared to the US. We still have regions where the most efficient way to get there is by horseback, airplane (puddle jumper type), foot, and/or extremely rough roads.

Thats why I grouped Northern England and Scotland together

Yeah, I have to that here to (except using an aeroplane)

Edit: Its like £20 to drive to the nearest city and back in petrol costs

edited 25th Aug '11 5:39:18 AM by whaleofyournightmare

The entire UK is still smaller than Oregon.

But subsidizing oil just to help Rural Communities is expensive and wasteful.

New York (very dense 30mil people) also get low oil price.

Bos Wash( Boston-NYC-DC), Texas Triangle(Houston-Austin-Dallas), Chi-Pitts( Chicago - Pittsburgh) and South Calif (LA-Phoenix-Vegas) in total have at least 100+ million / half the population of America that don't need subsidized.

if the need is to care for rural people in Dakota, Montana, and Alaska then Direct Subsidy will be more effective.

I'm not sure why anyone would want to normalize if you're better off.

Slightly offtopic, but the 2008 crash wasn't from gas prices. That was the housing bubble/bad mortgage failure, where everything went to shit because banks gave out a whole bunch of loans to people who weren't qualified for them. They then proceeded to sell these bad loans to other people, disguised as low risk debt.

Much like the Great Depression stock market "short selling" of stocks, it all worked fine...as long as the market (housing prices) kept going up.

Until they didn't anymore. Market was flooded.

Actually the point still stands for Canada. Our gas taxes are far higher than in the states and our economy is doing much better. The economic slump right now isn't due to gas prices and a slow increase on gas prices, combined with a decrease on taxation on the poor (combined with increased transfer payments) to make the carbon tax a revenue neutral approach, means that you'll be killing two birds with one stone. You help the poor and you encourage more efficient gasoline usage.

The problem is that in order to be fair, any carbon tax must be accompanied by assistance to the poor and rural people.

And both of those are anathema to Republicans. So it's about as likely as getting pigs to fly twice, and Bachmann revealing she's secretly lesbian.

That's the problem. Politicians having (or choosing) to worry about their jobs instead of doing what the country needs. And an electorate that wants to bury its head in the sand and hear sweet words describing how everything is perfect, while everything crumbles around them.

And of course, the fact that there are any number of other problems that are a more proximal cause of the economic collapse than high gas prices (speculation in commodities, financial collapse, foreclosure crisis, massive layoffs, etc.)

edited 25th Aug '11 9:37:24 AM by DarkConfidant

It's not a leading cause but it certainly doesn't help.