Gas Tax Relief, Obama Opposes
There is not very much we as consumers can “do today” to help reverse the escalating fuel prices and it’s financial impact, short of reducing the consumption. Frankly, we’ve not reached that price-pain threshold yet to convince most Americans to take action yet.
McCain has floated an idea to have a “holiday” from federal gas taxes (currently 18.4 cents per gallon) for this summer season.  Hillary Clinton has stated that she supports such a plan. Barak Obama thinks it’s a bad idea. (Interestingly, Obama voted for a very similar bill for Illinois back in 2000.)Â
Source: Wall Street JournalÂ
In a new policy split in the presidential campaign, Barack Obama opposed a federal gas-tax holiday supported by John McCain, the likely Republican nominee. Hillary Clinton said she would be open to the tax break.
Sen. Obama, who voted for a temporary gas-tax break when he was a state senator in Illinois, rejected a federal tax holiday as bad fiscal policy. The federal gas tax raises money to repair and expand the highway system.
In Illinois in 2000, Sen. Obama voted for a six-month, five-percentage point break on the state’s 6.25% gas sales tax. The reduction of the tax, which goes into a general revenue fund, passed on a 55-1 vote and included measures designed to ensure that the benefits of the tax break reached consumers. At one point, Sen. Obama jokingly asked on the Senate floor whether it would be possible to install placards on gas-station pumps telling motorists he had helped win temporary price relief.
When some state legislators tried to make the suspension permanent before it expired, Sen. Obama spoke out against that measure but defended his vote for the holiday, according to transcripts posted on the legislature’s Web site.
“I originally voted for the suspension because I thought that it was extraordinary circumstances, given the huge hike in prices,†he said at the time. Gas prices averaged $1.52 a gallon in March 2000.
You can check what your state fuel tax surcharge is in addition to the 18.4 cents per gallon the federal government takes.
Our goal needs to be more than energy independence
…In the end oil, coal, and food are foolish to burn, all create carcinogenic compounds that pollute the air – and if you have a ecological concern that should be it, not global warming. However our current eco-movements are headed down this exact path, with politicians hostage to the coal, oil, and bio-fuel lobbies worldwide.
We have the means to create plentiful, worldwide, cheap energy with Nuclear, Solar, Hydroelectric, Wind, Geothermal, Ocean thermal, and in the future Solar Power Satellites. The chest of options for really clean energy is full, but we fail to open it.
Our goal needs to be more than energy independence, if we are truly a great nation then we should set the bar higher – we must create abundant clean energy for the world.
Massive Oil Deposit Could Increase US reserves by 10x
America is sitting on top of a super massive 200 billion barrel Oil Field that could potentially make America Energy Independent and until now has largely gone unnoticed. Thanks to new technology the Bakken Formation in North Dakota could boost America’s Oil reserves by an incredible 10 times, giving western economies the trump card against OPEC’s short squeeze on oil supply and making Iranian and Venezuelan threats of disrupted supply irrelevant.
In the next 30 days the USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) will release a new report giving an accurate resource assessment of the Bakken Oil Formation that covers North Dakota and portions of South Dakota and Montana. With new horizontal drilling technology it is believed that from 175 to 500 billion barrels of recoverable oil are held in this 200,000 square mile reserve that was initially discovered in 1951. The USGS did an initial study back in 1999 that estimated 400 billion recoverable barrels were present but with prices bottoming out at $10 a barrel back then the report was dismissed because of the higher cost of horizontal drilling techniques that would be needed, estimated at $20-$40 a barrel…
Ethanol and the law of unintended consequences
Fuel or folly?
Cinnamon Stillwell
Wednesday, April 2, 2008In the pantheon of well-intentioned governmental policies gone awry, massive ethanol biofuel production may go down as one of the biggest blunders in history. An unholy alliance of environmentalists, agribusiness, biofuel corporations and politicians has been touting ethanol as the cure to all our environmental ills, when in fact it may be doing more harm than good. An array of unintended consequences is wreaking havoc on the economy, food production and, perhaps most ironically, the environment.
13,044,295,316
13,044,295,316
That’s the estimated number of gallons of gasoline that could be saved in one year if every registered vehicle in the United States used 1 less gallon of gasoline each week. That’s enough to supply the nation’s petroleum needs for 15 days.
- Delta’s Sky Magazine, March 2008
Based on current prices in my neighborhood ($3.25/gal)Â it would also amount to a savings of roughly $42,393,959,777 for American consumers – read 42 BILLION dollars.
Now THAT sounds like a stimulus package for the American economy.
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