Friday, May 25, 2007

OPEC Day?

OPEC must love Memorial Day. Not because they want to memorialize America's military casualties, but because Americans burn a lot of gas. According to the AAA, 32,100,000 people will travel by cars and trucks for the Memorial Day weekend, up 1.8 percent from last year. About 4.4 million will fly and about 1.9 million will go by train or bus. I and many of my friends will be burning copious quantities of gas and diesel out on the water despite marina prices nearing $4.00 per gallon. My boat is lucky to get 2.5 MPG at cruising speed and of course some of my friends from the yacht club going out to the Bahamas for the week will be getting many times worse than that.

Americans complain about fuel costs but they really don't care enough to trade the Escalade for a real car. The few who benefit from Bush's tax cuts care less. Complaints from those whose lives are adversely affected by gas prices matter little since they'll so eagerly vote against their own self interest if you say "freedom" and 9/11 and "Liberal" enough, it isn't worth accommodating them.

The silliness of the Reaganomic idea that upper bracket tax cuts will enable the upper classes to hire more people and thus benefit the economy can be seen lined up all along the Florida coastline with multimillion dollar, corporate owned yachts registered in the Cayman Islands and other tax havens lined up like Hyundais in a Wal-Mart parking lot. Commodore Gotyatz isn't going to give his employees a raise, he's going to give himself one and will either salt it away abroad or buy a bigger boat from Taiwan or simply run it through the twin Yanmar Diesels humming away below the teak decks in the Caribbean sun.

Of course there are a lot of people who may have to choose between lunch and the gas to get to work, but who cares? This is America, not some socialist workers paradise.

4 comments:

Intellectual Insurgent said...

Forget OPEC. It should be called Exxon day.

RR said...

Trickle-down economics has always been a joke. To expect those with more to actually spend it in ways directly beneficial to the American working class is absurd.

It would make (a small bit of) sense if anywhere near 50% of the products the rich spend their money on where produced here... But the fraction of "trickle-down-dollars" that make it into the pocket of our working poor is almost non-existent.

Capt. Fogg said...

And we don't make much here any more even if we did want to buy American.

Every day is Exxon day.

d.K. said...

"...like Hyundais in a Wal-Mart parking lot.

Good one. ;-)