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The Stimulus, Right Wingers, Left Wingers, Obama And Bipartisanship
Excerpt:
Principle was sited as the left and right wingers did battle on the House and Senate stimulus bills. With the caustic atmosphere in on Capitol Hill being anything but “post partisan”, President Obama suggested bipartisanism takes time….
I may have some insight into what the president was trying to tell those stubborn lawmakers.
To read the whole story go on over to the Moderate Voice
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Tonight I listened to NPR’s Daniel Schorr wondering if there was “any light at the end of this darkening tunnel.” His function for NPR is “news analysis.” After his analysis, I needed some psycho-analysis. Before I jump off the bridge, however, I will attempt to go a little bit farther toward the answer he seeks. His only consolation was to hope President-Elect, Barack Obama could lead as well as we had all hoped.
I submit Obama can’t cure our ills without our help. What we need is a river of Ritalin and some focus. Americans have the attention span of a kitten in a room full of catnip filled balls. Most of the time, this phenomena is a cute distraction. An example of this distraction is our kids who would rather send a text message because it saves time. It becomes sad and dangerous when our national ADHD affects policy. Our abandonment of Afghanistan after the Soviet Union withdrew in the eighties is an excellent example of how we as a people can jerk a mandate away from our leaders in a heartbeat. Don’t get me wrong. I am not one of those left-wingers who believe we were partially responsible for 911. I think, however, had we not ignored Afghanistan, our lives would be much easier today. Afghanistan is just one more in a long line of examples of our inability to focus on something long enough to finish the job. Ironically, another of those examples, energy policy, faces us today.
Faced with dollar and a half gas, we have an opportunity to reduce our dependence on oil. Reducing dependence will take money just as it takes money to dry out an alcoholic. You can bet we will get amnesia about four dollar gas when there is an attempt to tax gas to the three dollar level. There will be those refuse to pay another cent. They would rather give it to petroleum exporting countries than spend the money trying to break our addiction. Americans were focused completely on energy policy when gas was four dollars a gallon. Now that gas is back to 2003 levels, we want our Hummers back. When a tax is mentioned, we will listen to anyone who will justify the status quo and ignore all arguments to the contrary.
Contrary to how it looks today, Wall Street and the banking system will rise from its ashes. When that day comes, it will be time to revamp our regulation of the financial system. Our collective amnesia will again make us susceptible to free market worshiping interests. They will tell us how well the free market works and we will forget all about the two trillion dollars* it took to fix the last free market orgy. Again, while the house is on fire, we are totally focused on the problem and are willing to give our leaders a mandate for action. Once the house is rebuilt, we could care less about keeping it from burning down again.
Daniel Schorr hopes for the hero of hope. I say the hero is or memory. Let’s resurrect our collective memories and give support to those who would help us fix our problems. In the coming days, right wingers will ask us to abdicate our personal responsibility which they regularly champion. They will ask us to let the lobbyist and other financial interest write legislation which will effectively allow the fox to guard the hen house. Left wingers will take the opportunity to make us feel guilty for our success as a nation. They will ask us to redistribute oil money and regulate the market engine into oblivion. We should resist these impulses however good it may make us feel. We should help the new President build a consensus and stick with it. When our pocketbooks feel the pinch of three dollar gas and higher mortgage rates due to common sense regulation, we should stick with the program.
* My guess of the final tally of economic stimulus and bank welfare it will take to recover from this mess.
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One of the things missing from most conversations regarding energy (independence) and environmental policy is transportation policy. There are no real solutions to the problems of foreign oil and global warming without including the who, what, when, where and how of transportation. The first real foray into combining transportation with energy and environmental policy may have come from Mr. T. Boone Pickens. The Pickens Plan includes compressed natural gas for automobiles and wind turbines for power production. He takes the natural gas used for power generation and replaces it with wind. He uses the natural gas from power generation in a compressed form to power automobiles. His plan is a good start. However, if we also closely examine trucking, rail and other modal approaches, we might be able to actually end our dependence on foreign oil while decreasing our national carbon footprint.
Since the national interstate system was begun in the 1950’s by President Eisenhower, trucking has been on the rise. Tractor trailer vehicles opened a new option to commerce. For the first time, a tomato could be picked in California and be on a shelf in Alabama the next day. At the time, rail was not efficient enough to compete with the tempo of truck delivery. Today, rail carriers can compete on speed utilizing multi-modal systems. A multi-modal or piggyback system consists of a container that can have wheels like a truck or mounted with no wheels on a rail car. These containers are also stacked on ships. This system allows rail carriers to go from ship to rail to highway without missing a beat. For example, containers may be off loaded from a ship in San Diego, mounted on a railcar to Memphis, clearing customs in Memphis and finally mounted on wheels and delivered to a market in Collierville. Collierville is a suburb of Memphis, Tennessee. The problem arises when the container is destined from Memphis to Mobile, Alabama.
See, Mobile is served by several rail yards much closer than Memphis. To be sure, some of those rail yards do not offer customs clearance. However, customs clearance could either be established or completed at the port of entry. The real question becomes why a truck is used when rail is less expensive per mile and has a smaller carbon footprint. Actually, rail is considerably less expensive. This is so because the trucking industry is subsidized. Yup, you pay for most of the cost of those bananas you bought at the market in your gas tax. See, a tractor trailer does 16,000 times more damage than your Ford Expedition to a road. But, trucking only pays a pittance toward the cost of the repair of roads in gas tax. Said another way, with a gasoline tax of 37 cents per gallon, a truck would have to pay about four million dollars per year in taxes to be taxed equally*. We might decide the local apples are a better deal than the bananas if we had better price signals.
Since the price signals are so skewed toward trucking in the United States, we have made bad decisions regarding spending on infrastructure. Citizens have rebelled against higher gas taxes. Some of this is due to the extraordinary price of gas. But, due to those inaccurate price signals, people have determined congestion relief is not affordable. Depending on where you live, you might spend three or more hours per day in traffic. This time represents lost productivity, more carbon and most of all zero miles per gallon. Better and less congested roads can not be reconciled by the public in the face of trucking subsidies and high gas prices.
Energy policy is more complicated than only high gas prices. Due to extraordinary gas prices, it looks like we will be having the conversation quite soon. As the oil lobby is marginalized in this debate, perhaps we can discuss ideas which will actually reduce the amount of oil we consume. Moving freight from the road to the rail road might be a great start. It is a win win. We win the battle against congestion. We have fewer catastrophic accidents between trucks and cars. We reduce our carbon footprint. But, most of all, we use less gas and diesel. Using less oil reduces demand and lowers the price. If we mix in a few other ideas like the T. Boone Pickens Plan, sustainable biofuels and electric vehicles, we could finally stop empowering the petro-dictators who seem so bent on seeing America fail.
*This is based on the conservative estimate of 680 gallons per year. Trucks will use much more.