Blowing off Gas

Today’s front page headline blares "What’s Fueling Gas Prices?" in 3" type. I didn’t read it, as I’m confident I know the answer better than the Detroit News reporter assigned to crank this crap out. But I’m all over the chart. In truth, the charts are my favorite part of any news article. I love ‘em. Including the bad ones.

After careful study of this humongous full-color graph, I have learned that I can, on average, save 1.3c per gallon if I skip buying on Saturday and head for the local Caldeans on Wednesday. My new motto: "hump day is pump day." I can save 13c on a 10 gallon trip.

Americans are dumb – that’s the premise here, you knew that in advance. But the fetish with gas prices provides fresh proof, in case your faith in American dumbassity has weakened.

Dumb? Dear one, this is beyond that, it’s dumbest. Americans love to buy a new car for $20,000, drive it 135,000 miles and sell it for essentially nothing. Do that math, that’s 15c a mile. They buy car insurance, a scam that makes a Nigerian spammer blush, for up to $3000 a year. At 20,000 miles, that’s another 15c a mile. Many people finance those chubbies, to the tune of another 10c a mile.

Hmm. We’re up to 40c a mile to roll their butts down Michigan Avenue. Don’t let me start on the electronic gadgets they pay extra for, which break more often than Bush lies. If you aren’t strong enough to crank open a window, please stay on the porch.

Then they whine that gas went up 50c a gallon. At 20 mpg, which is being generous for a typical chubby, that’s a 2.5c per mile hike. 2.5c? Didn’t you notice you paid that for the fucking cup warmer? Or the refrigerated glove box? Hell, look what you paid for insurance, which has a street value hovering 2 millimeters above zero. Gasoline at least gets you to the mall, where there are more gadgets to get.

In Europe gas costs $6 per gallon. Man, if they were gringos we could hear the whine all the way across the Atlantic. In California, maybe even the long way, over the Pacific.

The difference is all tax. The price of crude oil is global, the price of refining is global, and the corporations and their profits sure as hell are global. The price of crude oil constitutes the bulk of gasoline price in the good ol’ USA. Refining and transport do add in, but are quite efficient. Refineries are down to like four workers, and one of them is gonna take a buy-out.

Gas is taxed 50c in the USA and $4 in Europe. Could this be a clue to why all the attention is focused on gas prices, in the country with the cheapest gas in the whole world? (Ok, there are a couple political oddball lands that subsidize it, but they don’t count, do they?).

In fairness – and we must above all be fair here -- American economists have long noted this nuttiness. That people will waste enormous sums buying new cars laden with gadgets, finance them, insure them from corporate grifters, even own multiples, and then whine about the smallest cost -- the part that actually makes the thing go. But their reasoning is shallow. It often goes like this: the price is advertised on big signs on every block, so people tend to dwell on it way too much.

I warned you that it would be shallow. Here, we go deep.

All that whining serves a purpose. It has a populist gloss "Sunoco’s loco! Hex on Exxon!" but the content is all-corporate. We want gas, lots of it, and we don’t want no stinkin’ taxes. We will conquer any people, bomb any homeland, and rape any wilderness for our joy juice. Tax it? No way.

If big oil isn’t paying off the Detroit News and the rest of the media, it just goes to show that American capitalism is working beautifully, without resorting to blatant corruption. Keep ‘em whining, keep it flowing.

Let’s meet next Wednesday down by the pump, we can whine together.

Doing My Taxes

You hate doing your taxes, right? I do too, but I also like it. I find myself playing with various tax tables. I prefer the paper ones that smell of newsprint. But I settle for the on-line ones and print the ones that I really want to get close to.

Today’s output from this time-waster: America has achieved a flat, totally regressive income tax. I knew it, but now I know it for real. It took some effort, because there is no table for the capital gains tax, the one rich people pay. You have to find the right form to figure out the rates and brackets.

Wealthy people, most of whom get the bulk of their income from dividends and appreciation of stocks, bonds and other investments, (rather than salary) pay only 15% income tax. This "capital gains" tax rate was first slashed to 20%, then more recently down to 15%. (It’s even lower – 5% -- at modest income levels.)

So the wealthy pay the exact same 15% tax rate that I pay. Along with other modest-income folks. We have a flat tax, except for the poor. And consider this: The right wants to lower the capital gains down to zero; I haven’t heard the Democrats counter by proposing to raise it. Could I soon be in a higher tax bracket than the Fords and DuPonts?

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. So I move on to my State Forms.

I find a cool chart with all 50 states compared.

Michigan is one of six states which has a flat income tax (3.9% flat rate). Four of these Worst Six are so-called blue states: Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, along with Michigan. Blue means what now, exactly? We have to register our guns? Could we trade that gun thing for a progressive tax?

Nearby Ohio has a steep progression, from .7% to 7% (the latter starts at $200K adjusted gross income). California has brackets from 1% up to 9%. Do ya think all the movie stars will re-locate to Livonia? Some states (including Tennessee) tax only dividends and capital gains, not wages. The most conservative state in the USA, Utah (70% for Bush), has tax brackets from 2.3% to 7%. We need more Mormons around here. Maybe not, I don’t want to have to go to Toledo for beer. And I need one right now.

I gotta get out of these damn tables.

White Europeans: the Next Dodos

It’s in the New York Times, that makes it official: there are too few white people. This is leading to "dire predictions about a vanishing people." Wow, and I’m one the vanishers.
I wouldn’t make it up. Well, I might, but you can check it out for yourself at "The Motherhood Experiment" in today’s NYT Magazine.

In America there are two sides to every issue. Never three, or, heaven forbid, six, but we do get two. You know that because you’ve seen "Nightline." There’s that short guy who was Clinton’s PR man, and some right winger who says global warming is a hoax. Two sides.

But not on this one. "Scholars blame several phenomena" but apparently all these scholars agree on the gravity of the situation. "America has escaped such problem…staving off a crisis"…only due to immigration of breeding Mexicans.

Criminy, it’s beyond a problem, it’s a crisis.

It’s not just today’s article, I’ve read a dozen. They all assume, without so much as a qualifying footnote, that there is a crisis of low birthrate in Europe, and it will sweep through North America as soon as that wall is high enough or fortified with enough voltage.

No pundit ever seems to say "low birthrates are good." No one even says they are neutral, or not-so-bad. Low birth rates for white people are like Hugo Chavez: all bad, all the time.

No one in these articles says --

the population is projected to reach 10 billion at mid-century, way beyond sustainability, or…

in a few decades people are not likely to enjoy the wealth that white people do today, or…

fewer people means more sustainability, and fewer wars over scarce resources, or…

if there’s a crisis of extinction in North America or Europe, why not remove the walls and install freeways, or…

when you go to the concert or the ball game, don’t you love it when there are empty spots in the expensive seats, so you can sneak down, or…

it already takes 90 minutes to drive your SUV to work in California traffic, or…

… Ok enough already.

You’ve heard on talk radio (or more likely read about talk radio in Nation) that low-lifes say we need to breed more white people to counter the lower races. Responsible citizens repudiate those foul-mouthed, Fox-addicted racists. The NYT editors don’t even own AM radios.

Seems to me that the NYT writer has the same line, but in polite lingo. Oh, they do note that Singapore has gone too far as it "encourages its better-educated citizens to start families, while at the same time discouraging poor and less educated." Note how delicately that is worded: they’re just a tad overzealous.

The Times piece notes that Italy is especially un-prone to breeding. They remind us, in case we forgot, that it’s Catholic, a status sure to put you in deficit with the elite crowd.

The solution? The Northern Europeans are starting to offer cash incentives to breeders, to avoid becoming a "vanishing people." Turns out that social democrats know how to go forth and multiply. With cash in hand. I always knew they were super-smart, but it’s nice to be reminded.