I took a bunch of photos of smoke over the lake one morning a few years ago, because of the ethereal quality of the light, and the sheer novelty of the NOAA weather condition reading: "SMOKE" I just looked back, and that was 2023. Incredible how quickly it has turned into a regular thing.
SwingingTheLamp
joined 2 years ago
Indeed, if we want to call the gas tax regressive, then by that standard, the need to own a car to get anywhere is horribly regressive. If we're actually concerned about low-income people, we should be worrying about how much they're forced to pay for the gas itself, not the tax on it.
How many people living on their rural property build their own roads to get there, as compared to relying on taxpayer subsidies?
Talking only about the gasoline industry when considering climate change is, at best, ineffective. What's more, that's exactly what the cartoon is calling out, i.e. touting the reduction in tailpipe emissions while ignoring all the myriad other ways that EVs are just like ICE vehicles. (Which includes large contributions to climate change.)
Technically (as in, as a term of art), it is not regressive. Rather, the gas tax is a flat tax. A regressive tax is one whereby the tax rate decreases as the taxed amount increases. A flat tax is one whereby the tax rate remains the same regardless of the taxed amount.
Honestly, though, that sounds like an avoidant attachment style. He desperately wants intimacy, but it scares the bejeezus out of him, so he unconsciously finds a way to sandbag every potential connection.
let us work toward elimination the huge polluting industries for gasoline refining and distribution
Unlikely. If we keep doubling-down on vehicle infrastructure, the remaining ICE vehicles will see greater vehicle-miles traveled (VMT). It's not just the number of cars out there, it's the number of cars multiplied by the distances that they travel.
let us shrink the huge polluting industries of oil extraction and refining
Unlikely. The industrial processes and materials used to produce EVs use copious quantities of petrochemicals.
are a huge step toward slowing the growth of climate change.
Unlikely. EVs still need the same infrastructure as ICE vehicles, and the chemical process of curing concrete alone is one of the major sources of CO~2~ emissions. As well, the ecological destruction wrought by automobile infrastructure is a significant contributor to climate change.
A road is more than a smooth, flat surface. A road that's designed for cars has to have an extensive roadbed of gravel and soil laid down, as well as a thick base of pavement on which to lay the surface, because of the weight of vehicles. A bike path, or a street where children can play, is comparatively speaking just some asphalt.
CW: leftism
Here's a concept that we don't think about often: Money is not wealth. Wealth is stuff, things, goods that make life better, or even just possible. It's just that in an advanced, industrialized, market economy, money is so trivially exchanged for wealth that we confuse the concepts.
But think about a billionaire dropped off in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness in the middle of winter. In that situation, wealth means food, warm clothing, firewood, tools to construct a shelter with, y'know, the things that would let him survive. Money is not wealth, except perhaps if he had billions of dollars in cash with him. Cash could be wealth, in that it's a material object that he could stack to build shelter, stuff in his clothing for insulation, to burn for warmth. But intangible money is not wealth.
So, the fact that all of those American citizens were able to buy things with credit shows that the United States is a fabulously wealthy nation. We can provide materially for everybody! What's more, the billionaire class is also fabulously wealthy, with an enormous share of the material bounty that our advanced, industrialized economy can produce.
See where I'm going with this? "Debt" is just numbers in a computer. Again, money is not wealth; the wealth was produced and distributed without money, but with this fake concept called debt attached. We could just wipe the ledger clean, erase all of the debt, and it wouldn't materially harm anybody. (In fact, it would benefit tens of millions of people.) The lenders already have their material needs fulfilled hundreds of times over. Nobody would starve. Nobody would even have to cancel their vacation.
Something to think about.
Consider that the Father of All Selection Biases is at work here: Of course we'll hear comments, from all the men who can't handle the concept of not sharing their opinion, sharing their opinion of not being able to share their opinion.
3
Planning Division Issues Report on State Street Pedestrian Mall Experiment
(www.cityofmadison.com)
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Indeed, it's not really a flavor, but that sensation is called astringent.