Autocentric America

I am fascinated with most people's concern for public transit -- it's a subsidy that should be eliminated! Let those bastards pay their own way! I'm tired of them sucking off my teat!

Today, Californians pay a 6% state sales tax on gas and an 18 cents per gallon excise tax. By law, the state sales tax goes towards public transportation and other mandates per previous propositions. Our Green Gov'na in the Greenest state in the nation in the Greenest nation on the face of the earth intends to eliminate the sales tax and raise the excise tax, which can then go into the state general fund and towards our mammoth state deficit. This would effectively kill off all state funding to transit while resulting in over a billion dollar tax cut to automobile drivers because the excise tax won't be raised as much as the sales tax reduction. That is -- we will be subsidizing private auto use even more while eliminating transit subsidies.

The argument for this is that society has already determined what is more valuable -- the ability to go where I want, when I want, via my own private means on public roads is more important than pollution, being green, foreign wars for oil and the 40,000 annual deaths and 2,300,000 accidents. I can understand this; we have to prioritize our needs. I just happen to think this is bullshit, but it's right in line with Autocentric American values.

That is, we passively, but willingly, accept the prosecution of foreign wars to allow us to drive the 300 feet to the mailbox instead of walking. This is an American value, and while it might never be presented in just this way, it is in just this way we live. Same for pollution -- the air is plenty clean enough so I won't fund initiatives towards better air. If transit met the more valuable requirements that my car provides, I'd ride the train, but until then, screw your transit.

This is a fatal error in my opinion, fatal because I see energy scarcity in the future. Not "running out" scarcity, but "much more expensive" scarcity. We will have not set ourselves up correctly for this outcome with these policies we're enacting. Again, this is one man's opinion. In my opinion, the way we use energy creates a host of other social pathologies, from war to pollution to a lack of beautiful cities...the list goes on. It's too bad for me that I have to live in this shit, but hey, I'm in the deep minority at the moment. While I deeply disagree with most Americans, I accept your collective ignorance. Perhaps someday a nice depression or energy scarcity development will occur and perhaps more people will come to realize how badly we've built our cities, how we've failed to integrate the natural environments around us into our living arrangements, how we've failed to regard each other as people, how today we're all just mindless consumers instead of contributing citizens.

Perhaps someday enough of us will clamor for change, for medium density cities where cars don't dominate, where energy use is minimized, where transit is respectable and timely.

Perhaps.