GM's Chief pushing for higher gas taxes.

And, Washpost: 'Obama's phony accounting on auto bailout' 'Most misleading collection of assertions we have seen'

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You just know they are going to be rapeing those voting machines like crazy come election day. cuhulin

Reply to
cuhulin
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I am not a fan of the auto bailout (never was - terrible idea). I do beleive we should raise taxes on imported oil significantly.

Ed

Reply to
C. E. White

There should be a floating tariff on imported oil so that any imported oil costs a minimum of $80 a barrel. That would provide a price floor for alternative energy sources to be developed against. Any source that would produce an equivalent barrel of energy would be able to be sold for at least $80 per equivalent barrel under such a system. OPEC would not be able to undercut the alterative sources because the floating tariff would prevent the import costs from ever going below the $80. If world oil prices dropped to $30 a barrel there would be a $50 a barrel tax. It's a win for everyone, even those of us paying the tax because it ensures alternative fuels get brought online which is what we need to happen in the long run. And we can easily afford to pay $80 a barrel, we've been paying at least that much for years now.

Reply to
Ashton Crusher

"C. E. White" wrote in news:islp5t$iu1$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

Why don't you just start voluntarily paying more tax? The IRS has a procedure for exactly that.

Reply to
Tegger

Protective tariffs do not work and have consequences. For instance the sugar tariff which has resulted in high fructose corn syrup and energy losing corn ethanol. A protective tariff is for the benefit of someone at the cost of someone else just like a bailout.

What really should occur is moving to a non-interventionist foriegn policy. This would put a political instability premium on middle east oil and thus encourage development of oil resources in the americas.

Reply to
Brent

All market manipulations must end. All of them. Proposing different ones just changes the problems caused somewhat.

Reply to
Brent

Interesting, and it would be a good idea if the current regime actually allowed for drilling domestic oil.

He doesn't.

Reply to
Hachiroku $B%O%A%m%/(B

Brent wrote in news:ismmp7$5oo$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

The really dumb thing is that the ethanol mandates have pushed corn and corn derivatives to such high prices that sugar is now competitive again even with its own price supports.

You see what happens when government employees are allowed near writing-instruments?

What really should occur is the dismantling of ethanol mandates and the removal of sugar price-supports. But neither will happen: lobbyists will ensure that.

What /really/ should happen is a Constitutional amendment prohibiting Congress from passing such laws. Maybe it could begin with these words, "Congress shall make no law...". Oh, wait, they tried something like that once, and it didn't work.

Reply to
Tegger

Brent wrote in news:ismmt5$5oo$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

"Congress shall make no law...".

Music to my ears.

Reply to
Tegger

LOL!

Actually, it is working, TOO well!

Reply to
Hachiroku $B%O%A%m%/(B

By God, he's right, you know!

But that means it's up to the individual to pay higher taxes; even Obama paid at the lowest possible rate for him. That doesn't work, because they want EVERYONE to pay more tax.

Reply to
Hachiroku $B%O%A%m%/(B

It's not a market manipulation, it's strategic planning to ensure our countries security in the future. "Free" markets are great for most things but not everything - they tend to be somewhat short sighted at times and monopolistic at other times. There's a happy medium, which we are not at, there is currently too much gvt control and it goes way past market manipulation.

If you really hold totally free markets as your holy grail then you are a one worlder because complete freedom of ALL markets makes ALL countries borderless.

Reply to
Ashton Crusher

No. It's market manipulation which always has some excuse like that so insiders can profit at the expense of outsiders.

No single person or small group of people can know enough to manage a market without causing distortions. There is no "happy medium" of intervention. Once the first intervention is made it sets things on a path to total government control. Each intervention causes problems which needs more interventions which cause more problems that need interventions to fix which cause yet more problems... government is always considered the solution to these problems government causes so you get more and more and more government.

Did you pull a muscle making that stretch?

Reply to
Brent

You don't think the Saudi's (and OPEC) manipulate oil prices? Get them to stop, then the oil companies would do it directly.

Ed

Reply to
C. E. White

I don't want to pay more taxes. I want to discorage Americans from funding terrorists and wackos by paying exhorbitant prices for their oil...and then turning around and spending more tax dollars defending us from the terrorist that we are funding by buying their oil.

The Saudis or ExxonMobil or whoever can jack-up gas prices by $0.50 or more in a month and the DA Republicans mostly say little or nothing (and certainly do nothing) - but let someone propose adding $0.01 to the gas tax and the Republicans start squealing like stuck pigs. Makes me wonder who they are working for....

Ed

Reply to
C. E. White

You left out a whole bunch of stuff in the Constitution that qualifies that snipet and renders it mostly irrelevant....

In this case the following applies:

"Section 8 "1: The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States."

The way I see it, we are spending billions on wars that are a direct result of our use of imported oil. Seems only fair to pay for these wars with a tax on imported oil.

Ed

Reply to
C. E. White

Won't that simply subsidize domestic producers?

Why not instead raise the federal gas tax, which has remained at 18.4 cents/gallon for 17 years? The cost of maintaining the Interstate Highway System hasn't stayed constant over that time.

I'm normally against corporate bailouts, but the economy went into such a big dive in 2008 that the federal takeover of GM and Chrysler was probably a lot cheaper than the alternative, and if those companies had folded, even temporarily, suppliers would have collapsed as well, and that would have affected even Ford, despite that company being in sound financial shape. At least the auto bailout wasn't mishandled like TARP, which had few strings attached, so instead of putting money back into the economy, much of the federal funds were just pocketed by the big banks. The federal government actually has an unusually good overall track record at bailing out companies, maybe because it does it so infrequently, and when it is done, the government acts like an investment banker, rather than a bleeding heart social worker.

Reply to
larry moe 'n curly

I am still trying to figure out why some people think letting GM and Chrysler die would have been a good thing. To lose manufacturing capacity of that magnitude, and the number of jobs directly and indirectly lost, and the subsequent shift of purchases to even more foreign product would have been disastrous from both an economic and a national security standpoint. I'd like to hear someone's reasoning for this in more specific terms than the usual sloganeering.

mg

Reply to
MG

So your argument is because some other government varies production of oil in the territory it rules, the US federal government then has the right to manipulate the fuel markets here inside the USA? What's next, the argument that because North Korea's rulers do something, then it's ok for the US federal government to do it?

Anyway, the Saudis would have been long out of power without the US federal government proping them up.

Reply to
Brent

"the terrorists", the ones that americans would need be concerned about, are products of, reactions to, decades of US federal government foreign policy.

Reply to
Brent

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