Federal commission recommends 40-cent increase in gas tax

We're stuck with the highways, certainly. But why are we stuck with 110-year-old internal combustion technology? With sufficient demand, we could have all sorts of viable alternatives rolling out from the factories in two or three years. It'd be a patchwork of fuels at first - ethanol, biodiesel, hybrid, plug-in, etc. - but in a decade or so, we'd have sorted out a lot of what works and what doesn't.

We need to stimulate demand for better technologies. If gas at $8 a gallon is the only way to do that, then so be it.

 

And the railroad system you and Inky describe is the one we had in place 60 years ago - before we dismantled it. We just need the political will to remake it.

 

Indeed. What is this "mass transit" some of you speak of?
[/20 miles from nearest town of at least 10,000 people]

 

If you discourage people from driving, and you're successful, how do you build funding for the other forms of transportation? Wouldn't the funds dry up?

 

Put 'em in this: a 700-horsepower biodiesel pickup.



http://www.autoblog.com/2006/02/10/willies-willy-700-ponies-of-pure-unadulterated-biodiesel/

 

Like all transit systems, whatever we develop as alternatives - trains, subways, buses, monorails, etc. - eventually become fare-based and self-sustaining to the degree possible. It's not like the subway in New York, or the bullet-train to Osaka, are free.

And it's not as if we have to do away with the personal automobile - we just have to figure out how to make it work without gasoline.

 

What difference does it f-ing make? If this effort fails they will raise taxes on something else and then squander the money anyway on all of thier idiotic pork projects.

And people will still go to the voting booths in November and vote in the same idiots from the one-party system we currently have and complain for four more years about high taxes, wasteful spending and the shrinking value of a dollar.

 

A ray of sunshine wherever he goes.

 

I knew this thread was missing something.

 

I guess I am becoming cranky in my old age. The bottom line is we have had three new taxes forced upon us in the last year in my neck of the woods -- all of them on so-called "luxury" or "sin" items and all of them designed to bail out a failing infrastructure and bankrupt mass transit.

It is total bullshit but they can get away with it because we allow them to because most Americans are arguing over whether Johnny and Steve can get married and other idiotic non-issues than dealing with real issues that matter.

 

I agree, Zag, and I become crankier and more radicalized with each passing year.

But the only way to get better, smarter government is to demand it. To fight for it, to work for it, agitate for it.

I post on threads like these mostly to remind myself of that fact.