50¢ sales tax on gasoline?

[AtmaWeapon]

Does this only happen when you ride with your uncle Jim? At work we frequently fit 5 people in an older-model Civic and while it's kind of crowded it's because I don't think any car manufacturer really intends for the middle seat to get used.

[Rainman]

I have to disagree with the tax, because of this:

I have to question anyones sanity that willingly, for any reason, agrees to fork over more of their hard earned dollars to a government that has shown time and time again they can't be trusted to spend it wisely.

I do support, however, any non-coercive methods to solve the problem of global warming.

[Anarchy_Balsac]

Don't we all though?

The problems in the lower class in my opinion aren't often the result of biology; I have always felt that if you swapped the children of a poor family and a rich family at birth, neither would be the wiser. Intelligence is somewhat determined by genetics, but genetics can be notoriously unreliable when it comes to mysterious traits. Furthermore, all the intelligence in the world cannot overcome the socioeconomic circumstances in which one is born. Poor children live in areas that typically have poor schools, so while the intelligent poor child has a theoretically equal chance at scholarship as the pampered rich child, the quality of their eduction is typically low enough to deny them that opportunity.

This is true, although I don't see what it has to do with the topic. My opinion on why there's so many more unintelligent poor though, is it isn't just cus they get themselves poor because of stupidity, but because dumb people are less likely to control their reproduction. Having less income per child due to having too many children, as well as genetic influence from said dumb parents, is also a cause for this.

Although again, this has little, if anything, to do with the topic.

There's numerous other environmental influences as well. The situation is that yes, the poor do tend to make poor decisions that worsen their situation, but it's not necessarily their fault. If the upper class were investing more money in the education system than cars that cost more than a small house, then perhaps the increased quality of education among the poor could lead to drastic changes within a few generations. There's scattered success stories now but honestly it seems to me that it's really hard to pull oneself out of the ghetto. Even when one succeeds, the "rewards" of the lower middle class are often exhausting work in emotionally hostile environments. I've worked in an office and I've worked in a warehouse, and I can honestly say that there were a lot of benefits to the warehouse job that can almost make it seem worth going back. The thing I liked most was having my thoughts to myself; putting doors on a truck didn't require me to think much, so I could spend the whole day thinking about whatever was interesting to me. I'd come home hungry and tired, but I'd be ready to just kick back and read some books or play some games. Now, at work my thoughts have to be focused on the problems I am trying to solve; at the end of the day I come home and I don't even feel like cooking supper, let alone reading books with complicated themes.

Well first, on your education problem, it would help if the parents were competent enough to educate their kids themselves. You have to teach them to talk and listen before they can get into school anyway, and that, IMHO has got to be harder than any subject, no matter how complex. We're used to learning by reading and hearing words, but yet before we knew any, what did we have to go on in order to learn them? At least by the time you learn advanced calculus and astro-physics you have words to guide you. If you can teach language, you can at least teach them through the high-school level.

As for moving out of the ghetto, yeah you are correct, but it isn't as bad as everyone says it is either. Crime rate is in fact higher, but you usually won't be the victim of it insofar as you lock your doors and carry a shotgun. Believe me, the moment you are infamous for even so much as chasing someone away with one of those no one will come anywhere near you unless they are your friends. That and it's not like people get robbed every time they walk out their doors as the media would have you believe.

My point was really that these people are also subject to America's cultural desire to flaunt one's wealth, and it seems pretty logical that if you have very little wealth to flaunt you'd jump at the chance to appear as if you do. Unfortunately, most of these people aren't informed of the pitfalls of extended financing and end up in worse shape; honestly the auto makers are fairly sleazy for taking advantage of them. The other group is so poor that they are more worried about how to get groceries than whether the neighbors think they are poor, and this also leads to car purchases that do not target fuel efficiency.

If you live in a poor, ghetto-ish neighborhood, believe me, looking rich is the last thing anyone does. It's like spraying bright florescent paint all over yourself, then jumping out into a crowd, waving your arms and saying "I AM RICH, ROB ME!!!" The poor pretty much can not afford to live anywhere else, so I doubt any of them are doing that. You might see people who make $8 an hour driving dubbed up suburbans and stuff, but it's because they're married to people who make $50000+.

There are people who finance cars and put themselves into debt, but they're going to end up starving with or without a price hike.

Personally I believe that increased fuel prices put the wealthy in more danger of harm than the poor; a lot of the people that would be placed in mortal danger by higher fuel prices are already walking, biking, or carpooling to work because the critical point for them was reached long ago, or a car is simply an expense they cannot justify. The single factory in my old town that is located quite far away from the ghetto actually runs buses to pick people up to help absorb that cost.

This is far from universal however. I lived in the ghetto in arlington TX for over 2 years. You literally could work less than a mile from home, but be forced to drive because there were highways which you would have to cross, and you could not legally do so on foot. And not only did the jobs in walking distance rarely, if ever come, but there was no public transportation. As in 0, zip, nothing. No one was paying for a bus to take workers over to where they worked. Even if they wanted to they couldn't because there weren't any buses. There was an amtrak station in neighboring fort worth, but that's a loooooooong walk.

So in a nutshell, poor people just had to drive.

The problem is the people who are just on the edge of the bottom of the lower class and have managed to pull themselves out of these kinds of factory jobs into something a little better; they still have to drive to work and they represent a portion of the employee body the employer doesn't care about. I've alongside a lot of people like this and often getting a job that is geographically closer or moving is a financial impossibility. They are low-skilled workers that can only perform certain menial tasks, and job opportunities tend to be slim for this kind of person.

This is surprisingly true for the poor as well. I agree that it takes a dumb fuck to think you need 2 years experience to drive a forklift, but apparently, well, let's just say a lot of dumb fucks are in charge of hiring. Sure, a month, 2 months, or even 6 months experience for a simple task can be reasonable in order to help you perfect the task and thus make minimal mistakes, but a year? 2 years? 5 years? Well they really do ask for this kind of thing, I wish I could say I was making it up but I'm not.

It's funny too, because a lot of the poor end up unemployed for a long time because of this, and the dumb fuck hiring managers are wondering why they can't find anyone, they think that if they only hire people who have experience, that new workers will magically get it from jobs they aren't being hired for. And thus, I can assure you, that the poor have it just as bad.

If they turn to crime to help pay for their gas, the crime will happen at the pumps and for the most part the wealthy will be the victims of the crime.

Gas runs can be safe guarded against by the gas stations not being stupid and requiring people to pay up front for their gas, which they will when it becomes a huge issue(if they were, they'd do it in the first place).

The Escalade takes quite a long time to fill up and suggests that you have the money to afford it; this makes you a pretty satisfactory target for a mugger.

If people assume you are rich due to owning an escalade, it isn't because of the gas prices, it's because the escalade isn't exactly the cheapest vehicle on the market. And it's an extremely rare criminal who is actually intelligent enough to draw a line between high-gas prices and wealth. Even then, it would have to be something like $10 a gallon before people who can afford to fill up SUV's would be perceived as rich, not $3.50.

Please don't think I hold a disdain for the lower-class in general; I worked side-by-side with some of the poorest people I've ever met for about 6 years in a hardware warehouse. Most of them had more class and a better sense of morality than the moderately wealthy people I've been able to work with, and if I had my pick between sitting next to a random rich dude or one of them on a long train ride I'd tell the rich dude to go on. The wealthy have a responsibility to help these kinds of people, and the fact that there's a large portion of the lower class that has given up on honest work entirely seems to suggest this bargain is not being met.

Rich people could afford to be a little more charitable at times, but it is just as much the poor people's responcibility to help themselves as much as they can, and to not turn to doing the wrong thing(such as stealing from honest people who did them no harm).

I like your idea of getting people that want to make a change into positions of power, but I am such a cynic I'm not certain if it would work. Power and wealth have a tendency to corrupt people, and to climb very far up the corporate ladder one cannot rock the boat too much. Reforming the oil industry in this way would be a long, slow process, and I'm not sure our society or the environment can afford such a wait.

I'm a pessimist too, but think about it. Who honestly likes our gas price trend? And of them, who would continue paying if they had a choice? And of them, who would use their jobs to influence a change if they could?

The answers to those may not be 100% of people, but I promise they are damned close. Especially when you consider that for the last one, they are at work anyway and it's not like that's soaking up their free time.

[biggiy05]

Efforts this past decade have shown that Americans will continue to do stupid things - eg buy SUVs, not carpool, ignore public transportation - unless goaded by a monetary incentive.

Just to point out something. SUV's like the Chevy Tahoe and Suburban or the Ford Explorer and Expedition are more or less trucks. They are built on a truck frame, get roughly the same mpg in the city and highway and they are just about the same size. Even foreign SUV's like Nissan and now Honda are building their SUV's on truck frames.

Carpooling isn't an option everywhere and while it may work in Florida or New York it might be impossible to make it work in Virgina or Kentucky. Just for example. Public transportation isn't an option everywhere either.

I'm not sure where everyone lives at but if you live in a big city or somewhere that has public transportation readily available then you aren't really looking at the big picture. I'm not trying to offend anyone here but small cars and public transportation aren't an option for some.

I live in a small town in Ohio. It's almost tripled in size in the past 10 years and more housing developers are trying to march in but it still more farms and back roads than anything. The closest place that has a well organized public transportation system is Columbus. COTA is the bus service and there are a few taxi services running around the airport and downtown area. Columbus is also almost an hour away from me.

So if you live in a well developed city that has the option of carpooling to work or taking a public transportation then go for it. It's not an option for everyone and even then it's not a viable one.

As I drive around, I tend to see a fairly large proportion of new SUV-type vehicles compared to the number of new compact cars I see, which leads me to believe that people are still purchasing SUVs at a high rate.

Ever seen a family of five or six, sometimes even seven all fit comfortably into a compact car? It's an suv or a mini van these days. Both have their pros and cons but some people feel safer in an SUV. There are hardly any cars in production that can hold a big family these days. The station wagon era is long dead.