I think Texas has something like 38 or 48 cents tax on gas, at least thats what I read on one of the gas pumps while I was down there. Well, if we vote Kerry into office and he actually stands by one of his convictions, we could expect a 50 cent a gallon or more tax increse. I don't see how that would be good for the American people? The taxes on gas need to be lowered, and they could be. I am willing to bet that the taxes collected on gas do not all go into the roadways. Maybe its time for a little government downsizing, and put the taxes collected from gas where it belongs.
There are a bunch of ways that we could get our gas prices lower, or at least to level out. The main one, in some states, would be to get the EPA mandated additives out of the gas. First of all I would like to know if these additives are really casuing the cars to be cleaner; that is cleaner enough to warrant the big jump in price to add them to the gas.
I know there are a bunch of doomsday forcasts for oil, like the $3.00 a gallon gas by 05, but I really don't believe them. People that come up with these studies are usually tied to hardcore environ
mentalist groups. I have heard on the radio, maybe last year, about a study done at a very liberal college in the northeast. The study came to a couple of conclusions such as the hole in the ozone layer was not man's fault exclusively, and that there is enough oil in the ground to support us for at least 2-300 years. Now, getting that oil out of the gound will become harder and harder, but with oil consumption on a steady rise, it will become more profitable for oil companies to develop ways of harvesting this oil; and we all know that the greedy oil companies love their profits...
Another solution to the U.S.'s oil woes (after all, it is the U.S.'s problems that we do care the most about right?
)would be to allow drilling in formally protected areas, such as Alaska. I am not for clear cutting the forests to search for oil, but there are ways of getting the oil out of the ground that minimize harm to the land. To put an oil pump and accessories in the ground doesnt require all that much land to be cleared of trees. Also, the proposal on the table most recently would be to open up a whopping 10% of the protected land to oil drilling.
Also, someone stated how in the U.K. that gas was so expensive. Did you know that 78% of the price of gas in U.K. is because of their government tax? In U.K. prices, at the time of this article, gas was 86.1pence. 61.5pence of that was tax, or 71%. So, I don't care about these we should feel lucky cause so and so has it so much worse. Well, they bring it on themselves when the citizens ask for tons of social programs. Its a vicious cycle. You need more government help because you cant afford to live, so they give you more help and then raise taxes which makes it harder for more people to live, who then receive government help, who raise taxes, etc.
