I saw a fascimile of a $5 bill with "good for one gallon of gas" on it. While intended to be a simple commentary on the price of fuel these days, it also left me with another thought; what if the Fed did link the dollar to fuel?
One possible beneficial side effect would be that if the Fed and Congress wanted to devalue the dollar via inflation, they'd have to open up drilling in places like ANWR, the Bakken formation, and offshore in California and Florida.
I'm working on figuring out the downside.....
Podcast #985: The Secret World of Bare-Knuckle Boxing
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Have you ever noticed the guy in a fighting stance on the Art of Manliness
logo? That’s not just some random symbol; it’s an actual dude: John L.
Sulliva...
1 hour ago
7 comments:
i realize you're joking...but that would provide a bit of a perverse incentive for innovating away from oil. also, as if government/business collusion isn't bad enough for the consumer as is, THAT would be some serious rent-seeking.
the trick is simple; is there a technology that would allow this? Think about it; yes, you've got natural gas and coal (already heavily utilized), nuclear (already effectively proscribed), wind and solar (proscribed by cost).....what else?
In other words, for the perverse incentives to work,the alternative product must be affordable.
Dude - I'm in the UK, where the price of a gallon of gas is between $9 and $10, depending on what the USD/GBP exchange rate is doing. Parts of Europe are even worse. Now, what were you complaining about?!
We're complaining about the price of petrol. You're complaining about taxes. We do that, too, but our petrol taxes aren't as bad as yours. :^)
That would be about four quid per imperial gallon, no?
Yes, the price has touched £1.20/litre in some areas, which would be in the order of £5/imperial gallon, actually.
This discourages use of the car - and it does make mass transit much more viable as well.
I took the family to the UK in 2006 and originally planned on traveling mostly by rail as I had when I was a student there in '79. Soon discovered that the cost of rail travel for a family of four was prohibitive; the cost of a car rental and petrol came out to about a push plus we had the "freedom" to move around on our schedule and to be able to not have to carry our luggage around with us everywhere we went.
I sure wish the high price of petrol had discouraged people from using cars - we found the roads very crowded, even (especially) the Motorways, which made getting around very frustrating. We soon learned that any trip took 1.5 to 2x times as long as a comparable trip here in the States.
Nah, it doesn't make mass transit more viable--you still have massive subsidies for it, no? It simply helps to hide the cost.
If you look in my archives, I've done a touch of analysis of the actual economics and fuel usage of mass transit, and it actually turns out that mass transit isn't the environmental "win" that it's touted to be. There are cases where it's actually better to drive a large passenger car (say one with the mileage of a Rolls) than to take the bus due to how the transit lines are run.
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