Gasoline tax

Another problem people like to pretend is that Europe was immune from Wall Street, they would be wrong again, Frontline had a pretty good investigation on the situation. Wall Street went to Europe and did the same thing they did here, convince people with power, but with little Big finance experience, that they could save money by refinancing their debt on Wall Street, guess what happened. Wall Street has run amuck and we need to reign them in, they are the ones forcing the price of gas up, and draining billions from the Middle Class.

 

In Europe, the $10 gallon price of gas is mostly due to taxes from smart government policy to reduce oil use. Doesn't bother any class.

 

Yeah....I can tell.
The EU is playing it reeeeeeeal smart.
I wanna run our economy like they do over there!!!

Tell me....why are high gas taxes so very good for poor peopple, and yet all other taxes on the poor so very bad?
Tell me something else....why are there so many poor people in the EU, if they're illuminating a path that we should follow????
What's the under/unemployment rate in Italy? France? Spain?

Frankly....I'm a little more skeptical of their record of success.
One of the only things that Romney has said that they haven't twisted into a political gaff (not that he needs much twisting, mind you!) is that the EU isn't working in Europe!!!!
We're a different continent. Different people. There are Great people on the continent to be sure….I’m just not sure I want them spending my money....or to live under their governments.
When the Titanic sank, it wasn't loaded with hundreds of immigrants going to Europe FROM America! If their bridge log were a little more legible, I think you'd find that they were steaming towards New York...not away from it.

 

1. Gasoline taxes are good for all US citizens as they discourage oil use which, in US is the cause of 20 years of continuous war for oil, $14T in debt, $1.3T in military spending per year, $500B per year in trade deficit tax and costs in air, water and climate change pollution.

2. Poor purchase and use less gas and depend more on public transportation so increased funding by means of gas tax for public transit helps the poorest Americans.

3. Poor Americans buy the least gas so they are least affected by a gas tax.

 

Our 14T debt is not entirely based in oil. Our 1.3T in defense spending is not based on oil.

Increased gas tax doesn't help anybody except to line government coffers. The middle class are the backbone of this country, not the poor who "can't afford gas" or the rich who can. If you make gas $10 a gallon so we can mirror the failed policies of europe will destroy the middle class. Not everyone lives in your progressive dystopia where we can all just hop on our bikes and ride down gumdrop lane to get to work. Our country is designed differently and our cities and towns do not have the infrastructure in place to support european mass transit. And to ask midde class america to shoulder the burden on funding a system that will benefit a minority of people is stupid.

If the only response you have to any post is "oil wars, defense spending, tax the hell out of the middle class" then there isn't really much to say.

Guess what, it doesn't work. There are plenty of european countries in the toilet to prove that.

 

So making gas ten bucks a gallon for government funded mass transit is going to help? Ill tell you what, you can start by googling "the big dig" and see how great government oversight of mass transit projects is. And that is just at the state level.

 

That would be the urban poor, not the rural poor where decent public transit is quite impractical.

 

Government spending according to the bureau of economic analysis:



http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb...&AllYearsChk=YES&Update=Update&JavaBox=no#Mid

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2012/assets/hist.pdf

 

This table summarizes this article: National Taxpayers Union Foundation - BillTally Report 111-3

Annual Costs/Savings of Bills Sponsored or Cosponsored by Typical Congressman (in billions) (111th Congress)
Increases, Decreases, Net Agenda
House Democrats,$550, $11, $539
Senate Democrats,$199, $3, $196
House Republicans,$36, $114, -$78
Senate Republicans,$76, $51, $25

 

Remember to remove Social Security and Medicare from the graph and recalculate percentages since they are not discretionary and are not only fully funded by dedicated taxes but have run a $4T surplus over the last 30 years.

Once take those factors out, defense spending as 35% of the budget jumps out at you.

The fact that at least 50% of that spending, some $14, was spent securing Middle East oil because US is 50% less energy efficient than Europe and unnecessarily imports 50% of its oil.

 

Components of our national Debt: http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/mspd/2012/opds032012.pdf

 

5% of our national debt is owed to oil exporters according to the US treasury: http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/tic/Documents/mfh.txt

 

Wrong again,

Acording to the SSA, "Social Security’s expenditures exceeded non-interest income in 2010 and 2011, the first such occurrences since 1983, and the Trustees estimate that these expenditures will remain greater than non-interest income throughout the 75-year projection period. The deficit of non-interest income relative to expenditures was about $49 billion in 2010 and $45 billion in 2011, and the Trustees project that it will average about $66 billion between 2012 and 2018 before rising steeply as the economy slows after the recovery is complete and the number of beneficiaries continues to grow at a substantially faster rate than the number of covered workers."

Medicare Cost and Non-Interest Income by Source as a Percentage of GDP

http://www.cms.gov/Research-Statist...eports/ReportsTrustFunds/Downloads/TR2012.pdf

 

Shazam.

 

Would this be the case if our government had not raided the Social Security coffers?

I don't know the answer to this question, which is why I ask.

I do know that we have frequently borrowed against SS, but I don't know if it was paid back. Smaller capital and low interest rates would certainly reduce the available interest income.

Tom

 

One of Gore's issues was to stop the raiding on SS.

 

Very easy, and very wrong, to attribute the economic problems of the Eurozone to whatever policy you dislike. Their problems stem from the same debt crisis that screwed us: The markets (i.e. investors) were looking for high returns at a time when opportunities were scarce. Bankers (in the U.S. and the Eurozone and elsewhere) took advantage of this by making bad loans that could never be paid back, and selling the loans to investors, after getting high ratings from incompetent (or crooked???) rating agencies. When the bubble burst, the bankers were laughing with full pockets while their banks failed and the rest of us had to bail them out.

ETC(SS): I agree that the military budget is very complex. I also agree that some good and useful research has been done by the military. However, we spend so much more on weapons and wars (borrowing pretty much all of it these days) than any other country that it has a very negative effect on the economy.

I am not an isolationist, but when you've spent a century propping up unpopular dictators, and maintaining irrational national boundaries that you and your allies have imposed on a region for your own political motives without taking into account the needs and desires of the populace, supporting and waging wars with devastating civilian casualties, the inevitable result is that the locals will grow to hate you, and some small number of them will become terrorists. Terrorism (in the sense we normally use it) is just war waged by people who don't have national armies. And war is just terrorism when it's done by governments rather than by small groups. Our Middle east policy has caused us nothing but grief, and if it was not based on our desire for cheap oil, then there was no rationale for it at all.

As for my own gasoline use, my daily car uses none at all. It uses electricity from hydroelectric. I drive the Prius up to Canada for my hiking trips. Under 1,000 miles a year altogether. At 50 mpg (my mileage on those road trips) I should be using 20 gallons a year. I do not know "my" share of the jet fuel used when I fly. I took 3 flying vacations a year for a few years, but I've only taken one since mid-May of last year and have no immediate plans at present since my tentative June trip is looking unlikely now.

But I'm a strong supporter of a mileage-based tax on my electric car, or a yearly tax if the state politicians cannot decide on a way to administer a mileage-based one.

 

That's who purchased the debt generated by military overspending and bad tax policies over last 30 years. It does give you an idea of where the $6GT in US trade deficit dollars was generated by the unnecessary oil imports we waste military dollars defending but not much else.

Demonstrating that Social Security had nothing to do with current deficits and debt. SS/Medicare are collectively owed $4T that they lent to US military to prepare for and fight oil wars.

The lead paragraph in the report you quoted was this:

The projected point at which the combined Trust Funds will be exhausted comes in 2037 – the same as the estimate in last year’s report. At that time, there will be sufficient tax revenue coming in to pay about 78 percent of benefits.

Since we are going to tax ourselves to pay the $4T to pay back to SS, we may as well raise SS taxes and forgive the debt to ourselves. Might be too honest a solution for US. The wacky Ryan budget has us borrowing from China to pay the $4T owed to SS.

That $4T is money we didn't have to borrow from any of the US oil importing nations where our Middle East army is stationed.

That's good news.

So back to gas tax, the reason for a gasoline tax (should really be a per barrel oil tax) is that $14T in debt generated by military overspending and the $6T in oil trade deficit is due to US energy inefficiency and resulting need to import 50% of our oil.

The gas/oil tax is to pay for the costs directly attributable to oil, to discourage further oil use and energy efficiency, to reward those who are more energy efficient (hybrid, EV owners for example) and to finance upgrading US economy energy efficiency with a focus on oil use to eliminate oil trade deficit, eliminate the Middle East oil threat that is responsible for the military overspending.

 

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I'm against a mileage-based tax unless it applies equally to all. Why should a Geo Metro driver pay less in taxes than a Prius driver when, for all practical purposes, they achieve the same fuel mileage? In fact, I think something more targeted at how much wear, tear and abuse a road takes would be pretty fair. For example, eliminate the fuel tax and create a tire tax. Vehicles with larger tires pay more because the vehicles they put them on are harder on the road surfaces. More tires, as in the case of semi trucks create more wear.

For example, take a typical passenger car tire:

50,000 mile useful life
30 mpg car
1667 gallons of fuel burned during the lifetime of the tire.
Take the ~20 cents per gallon that is currently on fuel purchases and tack it onto the tires.
That comes to $83 per tire.
Simple. Everybody pays based on REAL use of roads. Income to the road coffers would actually increase because there are a fair number of tires that rot out vs. wearing out. It may even cut back on tire waste as people would see some benefit in actually wearing out their tires before replacing them or upsizing them for nothing more than cosmetic reasons at the expense of wasted fuel and tires.