05.04.08
Gas Taxes Are Not The Problem
Higher fuel prices are causing pain for most people in our country. As a consequence, Congress-members are talking about temporarily suspending the tax (about 18 cents per gallon on gasoline) for a few months. The problem is, gas prices are likely to briefly drop later this year, and then start rising again, possibly going until they surpass five dollars per gallon.
The gas tax suspension will slightly reduce present pain, but in the process, will also lead to much greater pain in the future. What we need is to make it financially untenable for most people to operate low-mileage vehicles such as pickups and SUVs. Why? Because we need to make some dramatic changes in our economy and infrastructure, but are not willing to do so as long as we continue to have relatively cheap fuel.
How many of us have lots of single-layer glass in our homes? This is a sure-fire way to waste energy, heating and cooling the great outdoors. How many of us have only minimal insulation? How many of us have city governments that balk at energy-conservation efforts that might not match the look of the rest of the town?
All of that must change. But it won’t change unless the cost of change is lower than the cost of keeping things the way they are. Years ago, during California’s power crisis, a resident of my town wanted to put up a windmill to generate some of his family’s electric power. The town told him that he could only have it if it was forty feet tall, surrounded by trees that were sixty feet tall, because it needed to be invisible to the neighbors. This is the same mentality that causes them to require mobile telephone towers to be disguised as hideous false trees or hidden inside of building attics and fat flagpoles. We then complain because we cannot get reliable service on our phones.
If we want to reduce the pain of higher fuel costs, we have to first let the pain get so intense that people refuse to take jobs that involve long commutes or refuse to live long distances from their existing workplaces. I can say this, because where I live, most available jobs are seventy-five miles or more from home. As a result, I do work where I fly outside the area (I’m currently working in Columbus, Ohio). Meanwhile, I’ve got my eyes open for jobs and housing together, preferably outside of California.
In the Inland Empire of California (and the I-15 corridor North of the I.E.), we have made a conscious decision to encourage housing developments and retail developments, without corresponding industrial, mining, and agricultural development. We have lots of homes, we have low-wage retail and service jobs (but even there, not enough to meet the demand), but we sorely lack local jobs that have pay and benefits sufficient to support a family on. Therefore, most of our residents get in their cars and drive fifty, seventy-five, or even one hundred miles one-way to get to work. We could sacrifice and put in high-speed commuter rail systems to make this tenable, or we could refuse to approve housing developments that do not have sufficient employment opportunities within twenty or twenty-five miles. However, hard decisions such as these will never happen until we stop fiddling with the system and let greedy oil companies chase off all their customers.
