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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (386059)	5/23/2008 8:50:07 PM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576929

You're not making any sense. Technology shouldn't be a goal in itself. Rather, it should be the means to the goal. As I said, you tax inefficiency, not technology. If you tax inefficient gasoline consumption, the marketplace will figure out a whole bunch of ways around gasoline consumption... may the best technolgy win. Your solution is to tax a technology (gasoline) and the government decides which alternate technology is better. If the goal is less fuel consumption, taxing gas is the most effective way of convincing people to conserve. After that, you let citizens decide on their own what technologies or conservation strategies work best for them. First, if you tax gasoline, on top of the price increases due to the marketplace, you put the economy in a world of hurt. Most places in this country you can't get from point A to point B on public transportation. If you tax inefficiency then, as you say, "you let citizens decide on their own what technologies or conservation strategies work best for them". You don't subsidize alternatives willy nilly. You subsidize efficiency, technology agnostic. If you want government to tax sales or registration of fuel-inefficient vehicles, all you're doing is coercing people into different technologies, but there will be absolutely no incentive to take mass transit, carpool, live closer to work, telecommute, etc. People may even feel compelled to drive more. Just one example of an unintended consequence offsetting the benefits of new technology. Well frankly I'm not trying to change the American lifestyle and make people take public transportation or move closer to work or telecommute. I'm trying to get oil consumption at or at least close to oil production (and move on from there). I think the American mobile lifestyle is pretty cool, I just know it has to be done much, much more efficiently, or it WILL be gone. And our economy with it.