Michael Tomasky's Blog, page 10
April 4, 2011
The pastor and the Qu'ran | Michael Tomasky
At this point, it's still unclear what the Senate plans to do exactly about Terry Jones, the Qu-ran-burning Florida pastor. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina has been most out front, in the wake of the deaths in Afghanistan in response to the burning:
Free speech is a great idea, but we're in a war. During World War II, you had limits on what you could say if it would inspire the enemy. So burning a Koran is a terrible thing, but it doesn't justify killing someone. Burning a Bible would be a terrible thing, but it wouldn't justify a murder. But having said that, any time we can push back here in America against actions like this that put our troops at risk, we ought to do it.
It's worth remembering here that there really is not quite any such thing as pure free speech in the United States, general perceptions to the contrary. A citizen cannot directly incite violence without expecting some consequences, for one. Then there's defamation of character.
Still, it's true that the US is different from other countries in this regard. In 2008 the New York Times reported on a case in Canada in which the publication in Maclean's magazine of a Muslim-bashing piece of work by the American conservative writer Mark Steyn resulted in the magazine being put on trial. This would probably never happen in the US. Likewise, campus "speech codes" have generally fared pretty badly in American courts.
In the NYT article linked to above, even Anthony Lewis, the great civil-liberties crusader who wrote a column for the Times for many years, is quoted as saying that maybe a couple of exemptions to free speech should be considered:
But even Lewis, a liberal, wrote in his book that he was inclined to relax some of the most stringent First Amendment protections "in an age when words have inspired acts of mass murder and terrorism." In particular, he called for a re-examination of the Supreme Court's insistence that there is only one justification for making incitement a criminal offense: the likelihood of imminent violence.
I'm well aware that as a journalist I should be an absolutist, and as an American I fully subscribe to the notion of the robust marketplace of ideas and all that. But I think these are difficult questions. It seems pretty obvious that Jones is trying to incite...if not violence, then at least rage, and that there's not one redeeming social quality to the act.
Graham's "we're at war" standard is a dangerous one to use, though, for the simple reason that this "war" can be declared by our leaders to last forever, because it's not as if "Islamist extremism" is going to announce someday that it is no longer at war with the west and sign the instruments of peace on board a battleship. On balance, it's probably better if the Senate just stays out of this one.
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April 1, 2011
Demography and destiny in 2012 | Michael Tomasky
Here's a fascinating and rigorous study of new census numbers by the estimable Ron Brownstein of the National Journal on the steady non-whitening of America.
Basically: in every state, the nonwhite population has grown in the last decade, and at rates faster than demographers predicted. By 2012, certain states may be in play because of their increased diversity that have been solidly Republican for several cycles, Texas and Georgia being the big'uns.
Then Brownstein and his team did some really interesting ciphering (do you understand this Appalachian verb?). They ran one round of numbers giving Obama his same non-white voting support in 2012 that he got in 2008 to see how much white support he'd need in each state in the new demographic reality. Then, for good measure, they decreased Obama's non-white voting share in each state by 10% to see how much white support he'd need then state by state. He received 43% of the white vote in 2008 nationwide, obviously varying quite widely from, say, Vermont to Alabama.
Anyway, the numbers show that even in the decreased minority-vote-getting scenario, the changes are so dramatic that Obama can still win by getting less of the white vote in most states. Only in North Carolina, Florida and Ohio would he need the same or a larger percentage of the white vote. I grant you those are some pretty important states. But the numbers are small. In North Carolina, he needs to run +3 over '08; in Florida, he'd need +1; in Ohio he'd need to equal his 46% from last time.
Look at the putative swing states where he can afford to do worse among whites, and how much worse:
Iowa, -4
Pennsylvania, -5
Wisconsin, -6
Nevada, -6
Michigan, -7
New Mexico, -7
This is pretty dramatic stuff. You can be sure this is whipping around the right-wing blogosphere in that good old "before it's too late" sense.
But there's another way for the right to play this, and it's obvious. I'd aver that this one story virtually ensures that the GOP veep candidate has to be Marco Rubio. Given that the GOP is quite obviously not going to be changing its reactionary positions on immigration and affirmative action and so on, Rubio is far easier way for them to get their multiculti ticket punched.
How much does he change this math? Hard to say. A lot in Florida, obviously. But I doubt that nationally he shaves more than 10 points off the 67% of the Latino vote Obama got in '08. So that would make Brownstein's model particularly apposite. This is certainly worth your attention.
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Sad, just sad | Michael Tomasky
Reading this excellent piece by Joseph Stiglitz will not cheer you up, but I do nevertheless commend it in its entirety (it's not long). One of many highlights:
When you look at the sheer volume of wealth controlled by the top 1 percent in this country, it's tempting to see our growing inequality as a quintessentially American achievement—we started way behind the pack, but now we're doing inequality on a world-class level. And it looks as if we'll be building on this achievement for years to come, because what made it possible is self-reinforcing. Wealth begets power, which begets more wealth. During the savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s—a scandal whose dimensions, by today's standards, seem almost quaint—the banker Charles Keating was asked by a congressional committee whether the $1.5 million he had spread among a few key elected officials could actually buy influence. "I certainly hope so," he replied. The Supreme Court, in its recent Citizens United case, has enshrined the right of corporations to buy government, by removing limitations on campaign spending. The personal and the political are today in perfect alignment. Virtually all U.S. senators, and most of the representatives in the House, are members of the top 1 percent when they arrive, are kept in office by money from the top 1 percent, and know that if they serve the top 1 percent well they will be rewarded by the top 1 percent when they leave office. By and large, the key executive-branch policymakers on trade and economic policy also come from the top 1 percent. When pharmaceutical companies receive a trillion-dollar gift—through legislation prohibiting the government, the largest buyer of drugs, from bargaining over price—it should not come as cause for wonder. It should not make jaws drop that a tax bill cannot emerge from Congress unless big tax cuts are put in place for the wealthy. Given the power of the top 1 percent, this is the way you would expect the system to work.
Stiglitz might have added the very important point that the majority of the country's most prominent pundits who go on television and interpret all this for the American people, who soothe their audiences with assurances that all this is completely reasonable, are in the top 1%, which means households above around $380,000 per year. Many of course are far above that (Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, etc.). High-end print journalists who aren't quite at that level are still likely in the top 2%.
Anyway, the piece makes many important points, all of which boil down to the idea that while income inequality has several initial causes, there is only one thing that sustains it: a political process that is owned lock, stock and barrel by the top 1%.
Stepping back and looking at this context, and staying aware of it, makes watching these budget cuts particularly noxious. That's not to say there isn't waste, fine. But it is to say that the US political system of today is pretty inevitably designed to help the rich and punish the poor. So it's no surprise when GOP Congressman Paul Ryan proposes, as he just has, cutting $1 trillion from Medicaid, which provides health care for poor people and the disabled (an to some extent, a greater extent than many people are aware, middle-class families, too, in the form of nursing-home cost support).
Yes, Medicaid costs are high, killing the states. The feds could actually pick them up. Ronald Reagan proposed doing this. But that would be radical today. If Americans, especially wealthy ones, were paying taxes (income and capital gains) even at the rate we were in the Reagan era, we'd have no budget problems.
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The jobs report and 2012 | Michael Tomasky
It's very interesting that the jobs number today has the US economy gaining 216,000 jobs in March. The private sector number was better, at 230,000. Those 14,000? A few Wisconsinites, probably, and other luckless public employees, directly impacted by the budget cuts.
Anyway, why is 216,000 so interesting? Because according to this guy, the economy will need to gain 215,000 jobs every month between now and election day for the unemployment rate to go below 8% by that time. This writer, James Pethokoukis of Reuters, goes on to note, quoting analyst Matt McDonald of Hamilton Place Strategies:
Since 1960, the unemployment rate has been above 7 percent during four elections: 1976,1980, 1984 and 1992. In three of these 4 elections, the incumbent party lost. Only in 1984 did Reagan win with 7.2 percent unemployment, which was in the context of a 1.3 percentage point drop in unemployment during the year prior to the election.
For President Obama, with a current unemployment rate of 9.4 percent, an unemployment rate below 7 percent is hard to envision by November 2012. However over the coming 2 years, he would see an improved political position from a significant drop in the unemployment rate. Current economic forecasting projects a fourth quarter 2012 unemployment rate of approximately 8 percent (CEA: 7.7 percent; CBO: 8.2 percent; Blue Chip: 8.4 percent). If the unemployment rate can break this 8 percent level, President Obama can credibly argue that he is making progress on jobs, even though the unemployment rate will still be historically high.
He was writing back in January and making certain baseline assumptions that might be slightly old now. I've seen estimates that are a tad lower that 215,000.
The experts say that these current numbers are good not great because employers are hiring in line with increased demand, not in anticipation of it, as is the happy case when an economy is humming along. But presumably we will get to that point sometime this year. In other words, to this layman, I don't really plausibly see a scenario (barring major cataclysm) in which we retreat from these numbers. We therefore might be gaining 300,000 a month, 350,000, by next year.
When Obama took office, the unemployment rate was about 7.5%. It's now 8.8%. It peaked at 10.2%. (See this chart.) What number will be good enough by November 2012? This is just a matter of psychology and spin. I don't think it really has to get under 7.5% for him to get reasonable credit in the minds of a majority of voters for having turned the economy around. I think if it's under 8%, he's pretty hard to beat, assuming no catastrophes on other fronts.
And I'd be interested to know what John Huntsman and Mike Huckabee and a few others are making of today's number. Obama's got lots of woes - the budget and Libya for starters. But a humming economy makes people forget a lot of other things, and takes the wind out of the sails of the haters to a considerable degree.
This last point is something that doesn't get much attention but is, I think, important. The tea party arose in a crappy economic text. Obama has yet to enjoy a happy economic context, so we don't really know how the anger would resonate in the latter. I suspect not all that much, especially with Republicans having a share of the power in Washington, meaning that they can't just blame Democrats for everything as they did in 2009-2010.
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Friday quiz: what was his name, anyway? | Michael Tomasky
For a lesser group than you fine people, a blogger might prepare a quiz on something like, oh, major figures in world history. But you're well beyond that. And so it occurred to me recently: yes, of course; history's bit players. Those whom we barely remember, whose names have been all but lost, or are known only to people who actually and truly read history (or at least watch the History Channel), but who were part of important chains of events.
Rich category, eh wot? In my study of the French Revolution, for example, I took a bit of a shine to Camille Desmoulins – still a pretty well-known dude, I grant you, but not one of your front-line fame hogs like Robespierre and Saint-Just. Desmoulins was a journalist and, in the context of his times, on the left though not way on the left. In certain pictures, he looks like he could have been in Cream or something. My sort of fella. He fell to the blade, of course. In fact, it was right around now, I read this morning: he was arrested on March 31, 1794, and hanged on April 5 (justice was swift in those days). Danton was the most famous executed on that day.
Anyway. This was a challenge to put together in that it took a little more imagination than usual, but I think you'll enjoy it very much. We range here across a pretty vast landscape of subject areas, and there's even something in here for our noisy science caucus. So let's dig in.
1. Nearly everyone knows the most famous people in this category of endeavor, whose names are celebrated far and wide. But there were other practitioners such as George Peele and Thomas Kyd who, though famous in their time, are known to relatively few people today. What were they?
a. Explorers
b. Chancellors of the Exchequer
c. Elizabethan playwrights
2. Everyone knows the most famous of America's founding fathers. But match these founders, all of whom attended the Philadelphia constitutional convention, to the states they represented at same:
Roger Sherman
James McHenry
Thomas Mifflin
George Wythe
Pennsylvania
Virginia
Maryland
Connecticut
3. Bonaparte, of course, commanded the French troops at Waterloo, and the Duke of Wellington the British. Less well remembered is that there was a sizable Prussian presence at the battle, fighting alongside the British. Under whose command was it?
a. Frederick the Great
b. Gebhard von Blucher
c. Hermann Broch
4. She was not among the first-rank American feminist leaders of the 19th century, but her name lives on in part because she promoted a then-radical fashion for women.
a. Amelia Bloomer
b. Ophelia Corsette
c. Lucretia Espadrille
5. Some of his heirs have insisted on his innocence and sought to clear his name, but as far as the official record is concerned, Dr. Samuel Mudd was indeed a conspirator in:
a. The vast opium trade in China in the mid-19th century that started the Opium Wars
b. An unsuccessful attempt to kill Sir Robert Peel
c. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln
6. George Henry Lewes was a philosopher and critic but is better remembered to history as:
a. The longtime lover of George Eliot
b. The secretary of the Royal Geographic Society who accompanied Stanley on his search for Livingstone
c. The frequent co-author of Social Darwinist Herbert Spencer
7. The Serbian inventor Nicola Tesla, overshadowed for decades, has become well known in recent years, and his rivalry with Thomas Edison is much discussed and dissected. Meanwhile, the Italian inventor Antonio Meucci remains largely unknown, even though the US House of Representatives in 2002 officially declared him the true inventor of:
a. The sewing machine
b. The telephone
c. The threshing machine
8. In 1927, who were Earle Combs, Bob Meusel and Tony Lazzeri?
a. Members of Eliot Ness' "Untouchables"
b. Co-counsels, alongside the famous Clarence Darrow, for Thomas Scopes at his famous "Monkey Trial"
c. Lesser-known stars in the New York Yankees' "Murderer's Row" batting lineup
9. Churchill's war cabinet contained giants – Clement Attlee (deputy prime minister), Ernest Bevin (labour), Anthony Eden (foreign secretary from 1942), Churchill himself (prime minister and defence). Who held the crucial but less celebrated post of minister of production from 1942 to 1945?
a. Oliver Lyttleton
b. Donald Maclean
c. Desmond Llewelyn
10. Who was Miep Gies?
a. He worked with Raoul Wallender from Sweden to rescue Jews from the Holocaust
b. She hid Anne Frank and her family in an attic in Amsterdam, and later discovered Anne's diary
c. A Danish national, he cast the deciding vote at the San Francisco conference in support of creating the United Nations
11. According to Keith Richards, who is the true and proper founder of the Rolling Stones?
a. Bill Nanker-Phelge
b. Ian Stewart
c. Alexis Korner
12. To this day, the identity of this man is not known; when asked what ever happened to him, one of the rulers of the country in question said, "I think not killed."
a. The man who stood in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square
b. The man who first pushed his way through the Berlin Wall, as throngs followed
c. The man who shot the video of Neda Agha-Soltan, the Iranian woman killed in the 2009 protests
Okay, that was really pretty good, wasn't it? A lot to chew on. Let's take a look at the answer key.
Answers:
1-c; 2: Sherman=Connecticut, McHenry=Maryland, Mifflin=Pennsylvania, Wythe=Virginia; 3-b; 4-a; 5-c; 6-a; 7-b; 8-c; 9-a; 10-b; 11-b; 12-a.
Notes:
1. Not an easy one to start with, though I tell myself I vaguely remember their names and could have gotten it.
2. Rudimentary knowledge of US history and geography was your crutch here. There's a Fort McHenry in Maryland, a Wytheville in Virginia and a Mifflin township in Pennsylvania. Sherman is, to me, considerably less obscure than those other three.
3. I didn't know this until this morning, but Frederick was dead by then, and Broch of coure was a later novelist.
4. I want confessions out of those of you who actually guessed Lucretia Espadrille!
5. Pretty well known to Yanks, I think.
6. Excellent fake answers, especially the one about the Royal Geographic Society.
7. I had no idea of this, and least of all my government's official recognition of the man. So, Expat Scotsman, what do you make of this? Alexander Graham Bell was a fraud!
8. Scopes trial was 1925. Untouchables was a tough fake answer.
9. I assume this was easy for Brits. I tried to make it easy for Americans because Maclean of course was one of the famous spies, and Llewelyn played Q in the Bond movies. I never joke about my work, 007.
10. She popped into my head a couple of weeks ago, and that is actually when I thought up this quiz. Plus she's in here for Bookfan.
11. Boogie with Stew, kids.
12. Amazing that his name is unknown, isn't it?
All right, how'd you do? And tell us about your most beloved historical bit players. We could go on for days, I'm sure.
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March 31, 2011
Disgruntlement left and right | Michael Tomasky
I'm sitting here watching Hardball, where Chuck Todd just interviewed two tea-party spokespeople and showed some clips from the rally they held today. They vow, of course, not to back down:
"If liberals in the Senate would rather play political games and shut down the government instead of making a small down payment on fiscal discipline and reform, I say: shut it down," Representative Mike Pence, an Indiana Republican, told dozens of Tea Party supporters gathered outside the Capitol today.
The event marked the first official Tea Party rally since the fiscally conservative activists propelled Republicans to gains in last year's elections. Tea Party support helped elect 87 new Republicans to the House, ending Democratic control of the Chamber.
Now it's the right's turn to be unhappy with their elected leaders. Two years ago, it was liberals who were appalled at Obama's sell outs on the public option and so forth. Well, liberals are still mad at Obama, and in my opinion with increasingly good reason, at least as pertains to the budget situation.
I can see from the tea partiers' perspective why they're aghast, actually. The non-defense discretionary budget is about $1.25 trillion (out of a total budget of roughly $3.5 trillion), and $33 billion in cuts equals, as they repeatedly say, about 2.6 cents out of every dollar. If I were a tea partier, I'd be upset that the GOP couldn't do any better than that.
At the same time, I think I'd grouse and gripe and huff and puff for a few days but in the end declare victory.
But the most interesting thing to observe in all this will be the differences between the way the Republican establishment types treat them and the way the Democratic establishment types treat the US left. You'll see John Boehner and Jon Kyl and other GOP legislative honchos explaining to the tea partiers somewhat apologetically that Washington reality is Washington reality and they had to play ball, but I doubt very much you'll see any of them call the t.p.ers "fucking retards," as Rahm Emanuel did the left.
You'll hear a lot of commentators say "both parties fear their extremes," but that's boring. What's interesting is that they fear them in very different ways. Republicans truly fear their base, and they treat them with respect and kid gloves (to a fault, actually) and do their best to placate them. Democrats fear their base in the sense that they fear that they (Dems) will tagged as extreme if they don't make aggressive public moves to demonstrate that they aren't really like their base.
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Obama and independents and strategery | Michael Tomasky
Let's check in on the question of Barack Obama and the independent voter. You'll recall that after last fall's electoral thumping, the White House vow was to tack to the middle and win back independents. The state of the union speech - all those pledges about innovation and winning the future - were geared toward the nonideological mind.
Things were working for a while, and then kablooey. Look at this chart. Obama fell into negative territory with indies in late 2009 and has been there ever since, according to pollster.com. But just recently, like late January-early February - right after the state of the union - he nearly clawed his way to the break-even point.
Now, he's at 41-51. What gives, I wonder?
First answer: Libya. Here's one Libya poll out of about a gajillion, but it does show that Republicans backed the no-fly zone in, surprisingly, the highest numbers of all, 57%. Democrats backed it with 51%. Independents, though, were 38-44 against it.
I'm not sure why independents' views of this matter should diverge so from Democrats and Republicans. The only thing I can come up with is that independents tend to be not only less ideological but less political in general, and thus more likely than people who are more politically aware to look at Libya and just say, what the hell is this business?
Does the budget fight figure in here? Maybe to the extent that people are hearing about another looming shutdown and thinking, oh, not more of this crap. Both Democrats and Republicans will tend to take sides, while indies will be more likely to say to blazes with both of you. Republicans' approval numbers have also gone down recently, and maybe that's driven by independents too.
In any case the implications of this are pretty clear, namely that Obama isn't going to be throwing any long bombs between now and...well, and election day 2012. He'll be very cautious in everything he does. I wonder, if he is reelected, will he ever try to do big things again, or is that all over?
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Myths about the civil war | Michael Tomasky
Here's a little historical essay I tripped across from James Loewen, the writer, sociologist and historian who has made deep study of the US's racial history:
One hundred fifty years after the Civil War began, we're still fighting it — or at least fighting over its history. I've polled thousands of high school history teachers and spoken about the war to audiences across the country, and there is little agreement even about why the South seceded. Was it over slavery? States' rights? Tariffs and taxes?
As the nation begins to commemorate the anniversaries of the war's various battles — from Fort Sumter to Appomattox — let's first dispense with some of the more prevalent myths about why it all began.
The myths boil down to the idea of: let's cut the bulls----, the south seceded over slavery. I was especially intrigued to read point five:
5. The South couldn't have made it long as a slave society.
Slavery was hardly on its last legs in 1860. That year, the South produced almost 75 percent of all U.S. exports. Slaves were worth more than all the manufacturing companies and railroads in the nation. No elite class in history has ever given up such an immense interest voluntarily. Moreover, Confederates eyed territorial expansion into Mexico and Cuba. Short of war, who would have stopped them — or forced them to abandon slavery?
To claim that slavery would have ended of its own accord by the mid-20th century is impossible to disprove but difficult to accept. In 1860, slavery was growing more entrenched in the South. Unpaid labor makes for big profits, and the Southern elite was growing ever richer. Freeing slaves was becoming more and more difficult for their owners, as was the position of free blacks in the United States, North as well as South. For the foreseeable future, slavery looked secure. Perhaps a civil war was required to end it.
As we commemorate the sesquicentennial of that war, let us take pride this time — as we did not during the centennial — that secession on slavery's behalf failed.
Actually, I tend to think that heading into the modern era - certainly by the 1920s, the age of radio and the car and aftermath of the Progressive Era - slavery would have been difficult for the south to justify and maintain. Particularly as the US became a world power after Versailles. But he knows more about it than I do.
I'm most struck by the last graf, and the question of commemoration. The 50-year anniversary of the Civil War was basically won by the south, a story told so well by Yale historian David Blight in his excellent Race and Reunion. Then, the 100th anniversary (of the end of the war) of course happened the year after civil rights, the same year as the historic Voting Rights Act, and just a few years after southern states began reintroducing the stars and bars to their state flag schemes.
This year, we've already seen some dubious-seeming commemorations of secession. They can do whatever they please, one supposes. But it's kind of odd that the United States of America has basically spent 100-plus years pretending that secession was not about slavery, and it's astonishing when you think of it in those terms that we haven't really come to grips with this simple fact yet.
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How much leverage does the tea party really have? | Michael Tomasky
The latest from Capitol Hill is that there is an agreement in principle on a budget that would cut $33 billion from domestic spending.
It must be noted that the agreement so far is only on the target figure, not the actual cuts. But assuming they get there, that's an amount of money that a few weeks ago Democrats like Harry Reid were saying was utterly unacceptable. But now it's the deal. That sounds like a Republican win to me.
The tea-party element, naturally, does not look at it that way at all. from Dana Milbank's WashPost column today:
A band of the first-term members of Congress demonstrated their legislative maturity Wednesday by announcing, in a news conference outside the Capitol, that they wished to deliver a message to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. But rather than merely send him an e-mail or hire a courier, the lawmakers instead marched up the East Front steps and presented themselves at a seldom-used ceremonial door.
Being a ceremonial door, it was locked and alarmed — and so the freshmen used two strips of their blue tape to affix the letter, enclosed in a large manila envelope with the words "MR. REID" handwritten in four-inch letters.
"We're doing our job in the House of Representatives," announced Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo.), a member of the blue-tape brigade. "We put forth a proposal that would cut $61 billion . . . and yet Senator Reid won't even, uh, consider that. That is dereliction of duty."
As Milbank notes, in fact, Reid brought that very figure to the Senate floor, where it failed by a vote of 56-44.
From Politico, we receive the intelligence that the tea-party sympathetic members of the GOP House caucus plan on holding a rally today featuring "perhaps hundreds" (horrors!) of participants. These include the usual suspects: Michele Bachmann, Steve King, Mike Pence. And how many others?
That's the question: can the tea-party-ish members block a deal?
We can't know the answer yet because it depends in part on how many Democrats back the deal. My guess would be that most Democrats in the House would vote for it in the end, because that will be the White House position, and members don't want the uncertainty of a shutdown (which side will be blamed, what its effects might be on the economy).
If I'm right about that, then it would need a very large bloc of right-wing members to nix a deal, and I don't think they quite have those numbers. So let's say they lose this one. What next?
Then comes the debt-ceiling vote. But the way things look right now (and this could change), it looks like they'd lose that one, too. So then the interesting question will become, where does the tea party go. This will have an impact on the GOP presidential primaries, in all likelihood, and probably not a good one from the point of view of Republican electability.
Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself here. But this kind of politics is about votes and leverage, and the simple truth appears to be that they don't have quite enough of either. They'll become angrier and angrier. I don't feel like the Democrats have played this particularly well; substantively, remember, they are giving ground they said they'd never give. But politically, the bigger headache in the long run will be the GOP's.
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March 30, 2011
Obama and energy | Michael Tomasky
I filled the gas tank this morning, after letting it get uncharacteristically low, and was a tad surprised to look up and see that it came to $48. That's a helluva lot in the good old US of A. It was $3.99 per gallon and is usually somewhere in the vicinity of $2.79 or so.
Before we go any further, some quick math(s). Your petrol, I gather, is running about £1.40 or so? And that, Americans, is per litre. There are roughly four litres to the gallon, and £1.40 is roughly $2.25, so the way I reckon it you Brits are paying about $10 a gallon, maybe $9.50, or more than twice what we're now paying. And it's Americans who are in deep shock about gas prices.
I thought: good. Let's have it. Let it go up more and more. We have to change our piggy habits, and that's the only thing that'll do it, really.
Today, Obama announced his new energy goals, to make America oil independent by 2020. This makes him the eighth president to make such a declaration, going back to Nixon, and of course it's not going to happen for him any more than it happened for any of the rest of them.
There appear to be some decent things in Obama's plan, including a bigger commitment to renewables. But nothing's free of course. That phrase "commitment to renewables" means, say, tax credits for homeowners and businesses, and those tax credits deplete the general treasury and have to be made up somewhere. I'm all for it.
I was just sitting with our tax guy, and he was explaining the credit systems for solar panels and geothermal heating retrofitted into an older home like ours. They're fairly generous, actually, but a) the credit is not all federal, some of it is from the state of Maryland, which is a pretty liberal state and thus ahead of many other states on things like this, and b) even as decent as the credit is, you have to be upper-middle-class for sure even to consider shelling out the upfront costs. I would love for the credits to be three times the size they are, but Republicans would never go for it, since they think all this is fishy anyway and real Muricans burn as much erl as they damn well please.
I wish Obama had the cojones (and I don't really blame him because what I want would be political suicide) to make the simple and straightforward proposal of a big gasoline tax. I'm for $6/gallon gas in this country. I know the hardships it would cause. But habits would change in a damn hurry, I can tell you that much. People feel it at the pump for some reason in a way they don't feel it in home heating bills or any other form.
And think of all that tax revenue to play with, to give away to poor people and foreigners!
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