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Politics : The Citizens Manifesto -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (142)	6/16/2005 8:22:44 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 492

re: How would you deal with vehicles that have good passenger miles per gallon while having poor gas mileage. For example the 15 seat vans that my parents (who had 11 children) owned for years? Nothing is perfect. Look around, by far most vehicles have a driver and no passenger. That's one of the reasons that if we are to have a large government effort to intervene to reduce gasoline usage (something I'm not sold on in the 1st place) that I think it should be to increase taxes on gas. Higher gas prices promote things like carpooling, and otherwise loading everyone in to one large vehicle instead of multiple smaller ones. Also once someone does buy a large car, SUV, mini-van, full sized pickup, or van for occasional use, they have already paid you tax and have no special incentive to have or to use a smaller more efficient car when they don't need the big vehicle. Higher gas prices provide and incentive to save gasoline whenever possible, not just when you buy a new car. Yes, but look at the benefits, political and economic (previous posts and in the header). I think the downsides exceed the benefits. The federal politicians are always manipulating taxes credits to the corporations, top down. The current energy bill is 90% exploration credits, essentially consumption credits. If you think they are a bad idea, than lets try to get rid of them. I think there are a lot of worse things we can have tax credits for, but I'm no fan of these exploration credits. If the litmus test of "what's good for the middle class, and those aspiring to the middle class, is good for the country" is too simple Its simple in theory but in practice ask 10 people what will help the middle class and you will get at least several different, possibly incompatible answers. There still is some benefit to having a somewhat simple general principle. You can use it to dismiss clear cases of special interest pleading, and if the special interests try to claim they are helping the middle class or the country as a whole you can place the burden on them (at least for the purpose of this thread, its harder to do so in the real world). But it really is a general principle, not a specific goal. There are a lot of different possible specific goals that are compatible with that general principle and often a lot of different ways (sometimes directly opposing ways) to reach a lot of those goals. I'm with you on the problems of special interests. I'm not really sure I support the goal that the government should look out for the middle class (rather then the whole nation including the middle class), by making some active positive effort, but I do think it should stop doing a lot of the things that it does now that hurt the country as a whole in order to benefit special interests. For example I think we could get consensus on this thread to eliminate most forms of government aid to large corporations. I'd like to propose phasing out agricultural price supports as well, but I think that we won't get consensus on that. Tim