Letters to the Editor
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Published Letters: 351 Editor's Choice: 43
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Oil Prices
[Read the article: Hillary Clinton throws economists off the bus]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Demand for gasoline has fallen, but the price of the commodity continues to rise due to speculative trading
Well, we don't fully know what's going on with oil trading, thanks to Hillary's husband, who signed into law legislation which makes the government virtually blind to the doings in the oil exchanges. The Clintons are a gift that just keeps on giving.
That having been said, while demand for gasoline may have fallen a smidge here in the US now that the price per gallon has more than doubled over the past few years, global demand continues to skyrocket. I know plenty of Americans think the United States is the entire planet, but the reality is the economies of many developing nations are booming - thanks in large part to the outsourcing of our manufacturing sector for the primary benefit of international elites - and their demand for resources is growing in kind. And since oil is a finite resource with a finite supply available in the market at any given moment, price rises are inevitable.
Which is another reason why a gas tax holiday is a stupid idea. If anything, we should be slowly raising gas taxes, both to encourage conservation and to get people used to an increasingly oil-scarce future in advance. Better to bring it on slowly so that people can adapt than wait for some shock - like another oil embargo, a war in the Middle East or civil upset in an oil producing state - that would result in chaos here in the US.
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Hardly
[Read the article: Hillary Clinton throws economists off the bus]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]John McCain was the one who first proposed a gas tax holiday, putting the difference on our children's credit card. But all the pundits can talk about is how "Hillary's gas tax proposal" doesn't make sense.
We expect crazy ravings and idiotic pandering from senile Republican politicians - of course it passes by without much comment. It's surprising to see it coming from a Democrat, although given Hillary's history it's clear she's a "Democrat" in name only. When push comes to shove, she carries water for the wealthy Wall Street elite just as her husband did, just as any good Republican would.
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Changing the System
[Read the article: Hillary Clinton throws economists off the bus]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Also, how silly of me to think we can change the system, as she proposes to do with the gas holiday
How exactly does this "change the system"? The oil companies would merely boost the price of gasoline to compensate for the removal of the tax, and all of that money would flow to them instead of to helping repair our roads and bridges.
So I guess it would "change the system" in that it would take more valuable services away from working people and give that money to the billionaire elites of the oil industry.
And in this way it's of a kind with earlier Clinton Republican-lite policies, which shipped good paying jobs overseas by the millions while enriching multinational corporations and the elites who own and control them.
I think the biggest change we could make to our system would be to elect someone who hasn't been personally responsible for helping to screw this country up in the first place.
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With "Help" Like This, You Don't Need Enemies
[Read the article: Hillary Clinton throws economists off the bus]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Hillary has been listening - she is trying to offer help.
The only people the Clintons are out to help are themselves, to another $100 million from their cronies via their connections.
Remember NAFTA? Because I sure do. I remember when the Clintons trotted Gore out on CNN to debate it with that little nut Perot. I remember sitting there thinking that Perot was crazy as a sh*thouse rat, but that he was also right. Sure enough, the Clintons got NAFTA passed with the help of the Republicans and hundreds of thousands of jobs got sucked south of the border, never to return.
Of course, they didn't stay in Mexico, either. That's because the Clintons didn't stop there. As enablers of the Republican machine, they negotiated free trade agreements with every bundle of sweatshops calling itself a nation across the globe. No dictator left behind.
Now that they've successfully taken the working man's cake, they're so generously offering him back a few pathetic stale crumbs, in the form of this lame tax cut. Maybe if Americans still had the high-paying manufacturing jobs they held before the Clintons rode into the White House, they wouldn't need a $40 tax cut.
Not that anybody who ever worked for a living would actually see a penny from this pandering anyhow. Cut gas taxes by 40 pennies a gallon on Tuesday evening and by Wednesday morning the oil companies would have raised the price of gasoline by 41 cents.
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Good Luck With That
[Read the article: Hillary Clinton throws economists off the bus]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The whole idea is to legislate it so that oil companies pay for it
And how exactly do you propose to do that without legislating how much a gallon of gasoline sells for? Because if you think the oil companies aren't going to pass the cost of any taxation along to the consumers, you're dreaming. It's not like consumers have any alternatives.
You could try adding price controls on gasoline - pass a law to say that gasoline can't be sold for more than $3.50 a gallon or some other arbitrary figure - but good luck dealing with the consequences. The oil companies could just stop shipping oil to the US - it's not like they don't have customers elsewhere in the world willing to pay the market price.
Hope you enjoy sitting in lines for hours waiting to buy your $3.50 a gallon as mandated gasoline.
Whoops! Looks like the station just ran out. Come back next week!