Fri 2 May 2008
It’s been one of those weeks around here, have you noticed? Grading final projects and owing a report to NASA totally killed my plan to bore you all with several look-what-my-phone-can-do tech posts this week, so maybe that’s a good thing.
And more frustrating is that I didn’t get to weigh in on just how full of crap the Clinton campaign is again. As if being on the same side as John McCain isn’t enough of a clue, Hillary Clinton is still doing and saying anything she can to win for the sake of winning. (Meanwhile, some sociopathic Clinton worshippers are pledging to light candles for Hillary and “pray that Obama supporters will be less evil.” If evil means having the discipline not to expect a cookie right before dinner, so be it.)
This gas tax holiday is nothing but that pre-dinner cookie. It looks good to a child, but it only means you’re not going to eat your vegetables. Congratulations, Hillfans, you are children, and congrats to you too, Hillary, because you’re peddling the most ridiculous and counterproductive placebo in the energy market. You might as well start handing out crack on urban street corners.
I already went into great detail about gas tax holidays two years ago when Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor was swinging the idea around in his unsuccessful bid to be more appealing than Sonny Perdue. If you need to see the math about price elasticity and consumption feedback again, go there. Here’s the end result:
Assuming the gas tax that we’re asking Sonny to suspend is $0.177/gallon (a number I can’t determine at all from the data the DPG cites, so I’m trusting their very unsupported and under-labeled chart no matter how many rules of technical writing it violates), Joe Taxpayer stands to save $106 — but in reality, since this is surely a temporary suspension that would last at best through the election, we’re really trying to bribe this poor dumb taxpayer with $8.85/month. In return for this relief, we’ll be encouraging drivers in the greater Atlanta area alone to drive an additional 2.7 million vehicle miles daily — or 106,000 gallons of gas a day, emitting 929 more tons of CO2 a day. To suck that back out of the atmosphere, we just need TreesAtlanta to plant about 13 million more saplings.**
Do you really want your $8.85 now?
