Call It A Tax

I find it quite interesting how, when gasoline rises in price, pundits always refer to it as a "tax on American consumers."

Really?

When a loaf of bread costs more do you think of that as a "tax?" When your next $599 iPad 2 costs more to replace your iPad just because you want the latest gadget, do you think of that as a "tax?" No, you don't.

To suggest that the rising cost of gasoline is somehow a tax shows just how arrogant and mindless this nation is regarding energy consumption. It shows how we don't understand that someone else's resources are theirs, that if they elect to charge more for their resource, or if the dollar falls, it simply will cost more. To call it a tax is blockheaded.

But we routinely do it, allowing us to ignore our complete, total dependence on foreign oil. Doing so implicitly suggests that our government is creating this tax increase, as only governments levy taxes. It shifts the burden of our own failures to live sustainably with our own domestic resources to the "failures of government" to keep the price reasonable.

A no-fly zone over Libya is being considered. But had Mubarak decided to quell public unrest via air bombing we would never have considered a no-fly zone over Egypt. Why? Libya has oil, represents an astonishing 2% of world oil production, and if a new student at Pomona can't fill her graduation gift, her new car, with reliable cheap imported fuel, well, the government has to step in. Aircraft carriers and destroyers and no-fly zones and naval escorts for supertankers all to keep Isabella's fuel bill modest. If it does rise, it's a tax, and it's the government's fault.


What I do enjoy about all this is that the use of oil is so democratic -- Financial services CFOs and high school janitors both have to heat their homes, and both have equal access to our gold-plated roadways. In this sense, both are equally liable for why we consume 25% of the world's oil with 4.5% of its population. This isn't something that we can freely blame the rich for causing, and because we can't, and because we ourselves refuse to acknowledge that our 52-mile round trip commutes to our florist's or real-estate jobs may be the cause, we call it a "tax," and passively assume our government ought to do something.

Like drain our strategic petroleum reserve to shave a nickel off a gallon of gas! There's a smart idea if I ever heard of one! Let's use our reserve to quell pending domestic social instability when Los Angelino's have to gasp! use the bus to get to work or pay $4 to drive around the most auto-centric city in the world.

This photo took up nearly an entire page in the Elk Grove Citizen newspaper two weeks ago, as the article went on to say how gasoline rose $0.02 that week. Like that's fucking news. But...it's news around here, boy. It's news to a city that pinned its entire future and economic health on the cheap, reliable, and timely delivery of Norwegian/Libyan/Canadian/Mexican oil. Every resident is affected, because every housal unit needs two or more cars just to function, just to live here, just to buy a pack of smokes or watch a soccer game at a friend's house. The city council approved acre after acre of low density sprawl with no jobs and no meaningful destinations that forces its residents to contribute to global warming even if they don't believe it, to contribute to two foreign wars and no-fly zones even if they don't support it, to depress Nigerians rights even if they don't know where Nigeria is on the map, to set ourselves up for economic calamity when oil begins its inevitable decline while we happily motor ninety miles a day to our Bay Area jobs.

Yep, call it a tax.