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WORD COUNT
662
APRIL 30, 2008
A GLASS HALF FULL,
AND LEAKING – by Donald Kaul
The outlook isn’t
bright for the home team these days.
Housing prices are
plunging but you can’t buy because the bank is afraid to lend you the
money because you can’t sell the house you already own, which depresses
prices even further. Prices are rising, the dollar keeps falling, the
stock market is tanking and there’s talk of a downsizing at your shop.
Is it any wonder
polls are finding that people’s confidence in their economic future is
way down? Their confidence in the present isn’t so hot either. But I am
not a glass-half-empty kind of guy. I believe in keeping a positive
attitude. And so I offer a ray of sunshine to illuminate the Bush
Gloom:
The price of oil
reached $117-a-barrell the other day and gasoline at a California
station passed $4-a-gallon. That may prove to be our salvation. Here’s
how:
---It will, at long
last, force people to use less gasoline. We of the elitist minority
long have begged you of the gas-guzzling majority to use public transit,
give up your SUVs, form car pools, walk. Expense aside, you are fouling
the very air we breathe and visiting an environmental catastrophe on
your children and your children’s children.
You ignored us.
Worse than that, you scorned us. I remember, six years ago or so, when
I suggested a $2-a-gallon gas tax to encourage conservation (gas was
then $2-a-gallon, give or take) I was pilloried, shunned at the better
diners. Opponents warned of economic disaster.
I answered that at
least the money would go into the U.S. Treasury where it could be used
to cushion the economic impact of the price hike. No one listened.
Now four-dollar gas
has arrived at our doorstep all on its own, the difference being that
the extra two bucks goes into the pockets of our friends in Iran,
Venezuela and al Qaeda instead of ours. So be it.
But the positive
impact will be the same:
---A population that
uses resources more efficiently.
---A healthier
population, one that shops for food more carefully since it will have
less money to shop with.
---Vegetarianism will
grow because at these prices farmers will find it far more profitable to
grow corn for fuel rather than food, making beef too expensive for
normal (that is to say, poor) people to buy. Vegetarianism is healthy
so we will have fewer heart attacks, less obesity, lower food bills.
That’s the good
side. The down side is that our economy---already spiraling toward
Recession---will collapse. The house of cards that is our prosperity is
based on war, cheap fuel and selling each other our houses. We’re going
to be left with only war to sustain us.
Can’t be helped. If
you’re going to make an omelet, be prepared to break and egg or two. Do
not expect the government to do anything serious about any of this. The
people who govern us are not serious people.
George Bush has been
a particularly outrageous disaster. Everything he’s done has made the
situation worse, from destabilizing Iraq and the oil supply in the
Middle East, to extending tax breaks to oil companies already groaning
under the burden of windfall profits.
In addition, he has
proposed ending the federal subsidy to Amtrak, making us even more
dependent on cars and planes. (The subsidy, by the way, is $1.67
billion a year, about half a week’s worth of the Iraq war.) He has also
proposed shifting $3.2 billion in the federal transportation bill from
mass transit to highways. John McCain isn’t any better. He wants to
suspend the 18.4-cent-a-gallon federal gas tax from Memorial Day to
Labor Day, to make gasoline cheaper. This at a time when we have
highway bridges falling down from lack of maintenance.
Fortunately, we don’t
have to depend on Washington to enforce sanity upon us. The market will
make us do the right thing.
Are you having fun
yet? Don’t worry, you will.
--
Don Kaul is a
two-time Pulitzer Prize-losing Washington correspondent who, by his own
account, is right more than he's wrong. Email:
dkaul2@earthlink.net -- A photo of Donald Kaul is available
CLICK HERE
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