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Comment by AndyMcConachie | Hacker News Reader

Gas should be more expensive in the USA. Sounds like a good idea.

No it shouldn't. For the same reason you gave.

The price of gas is linked to the price of everything through shipping and transport. The lower the price of gas, the stronger your buying power. There's no upside to a high price of gasoline.

That's why it should be revenue-neutral. Every dollar the government brings in via higher fuel taxes, it should offset by reducing taxes somewhere else.

The average fuel consumer breaks even. People with low carbon footprints come out ahead. People with abnormally high carbon footprints lose. Seems perfect to me.

Except for decreased usage of gasoline and thus a decrease in the externalities of using gasoline.

To clarify or perhaps nitpick, if the price of gas included the cost of its damage to the environment (and all other current externalities), then there would be no externalities, and decreasing the usage of gasoline wouldn't be a desirable economic goal.

Right, but then, that's exactly the point of taxing it, which the parent commenter was recoiling from, because it raised prices. :)

No one stopped buying gas at $4 a gallon but they did stop spending money elsewhere to make up for it.

That's not true! I specifically remember reading, back when gas broke $4 a gallon, that we had finally discovered the price at which drivers change their habits. Below $4, rising prices just made them complain. But above that price, we started seeing statistically-significant changes in demand.

I think you're right there is a tipping point. I do feel that there is a flex point where drivers change recreational driving but they will still need to get to work and the grocery store. They won't go on fun trips though.

Vehicle miles driven went down during that time period. Additionally, there was an increase in the sale of more efficient vehicles, so people indeed did buy less gas.

It will definitely strongly affect the type of car I buy next when I'm done running the current one into the ground.

You know what was awesome about $4 gasoline? $3.75 heating oil.

There's some interesting evidence of gasoline being a giffen good for some segments of the market: budget constrained will spend less on vehicle maintenance when the price of gas goes up, thus lowering their vehicle's efficiency, and buying more gasoline.

A decrease in gasoline usage is by definition a recession. It is people being unable to be productive.

You're mixing up price and value to an extent. The money's not being set on fire, it's going to other useful things. The question is whether those things are worth more or less than discount gasoline.

It's largely being set on fire through bureaucracy in practice. I would get much much more out of the money myself than I do from the government.

Let's say this costs me a thousand dollars a year out of pocket. I could get a new computer and add a lot of value to the economy. Or the government could buy a square foot of pavement.

it's your taxes that build the systems that allow you to buy that laptop

It's also affordable energy building and sustaining those systems.

Of course there is: the more people can't afford to meet their own needs, the more people will be dependent on government programs.

Oh, wait, you said "upside"...

"No upside to a high price of gasoline." This is not true.

In no particular order, and off the top of my head, the rapid disinflation in the price of oil is currently:

1. Wreaking havoc on the budgets of most oil exporting nations. 2. Destroying purchasing power through currency devaluation in Russia, Nigeria, across the Middle East and Latin America. 3. Crushing the economies of parts of Canada, Alaska, and the Dakotas. 4. Directly causing job losses in Texas. 5. Negatively impacting the Houston office markets. 6. Destroying earnings of publicly traded oil companies. 7. Reducing stock market valuations of said companies. 8. Reducing portfolio values. 9. Impacting earnings of banks that have extended credit to oil firms.

Yeah, but my portable building factory is shipping more often. People have less of a delivery fee to pay and it makes them more likely to purchase.

Additionally, my materials costs have been slowly dropping as their shipping costs are dropping.

Win - win!

"Hey, Mom, are we going to visit grandma and grandpa for Christmas this year?" "Sorry, sweetie, gas is too expensive. We can't go this year."

"Honey, are we going to finally take a vacation this year?" "Sorry, sweetheart, I just don't think we can afford it. It would cost too much to make the trip."

"Hey, Mom, can I sign up for the traveling baseball team this summer?" "I'm sorry, dear, we can't afford all that extra driving every week."

"Dad, can I apply for that job on the other side of town?" "Sorry, son, I can't afford to drive you back and forth to work every day on top of all the other driving I have to do."

"Son, can you drive me to my chemo treatments in Big City this month?" "I'm sorry, Dad, but I can't afford to drive that extra 500 miles a week."

Those are just the kinds of issues that come up as a direct result. The increased cost of everything in the economy means that everything from eating out, to going to the movies, to getting the braces that your 14-year-old needs becomes more difficult for the average American.

The question is, what kind of person wants other people to remain in poverty, and why?

"Hey, Mom, are we going to visit grandma and grandpa for Christmas this year?" "Oh honey don't you remember? They passed away last year. Lung cancer."

According to a study, automobile emission causes 53,000 premature deaths every year in the US.

The question is, what kind of person wants other people to die early, and why?

Source: http://news.mit.edu/2013/study-air-pollution-causes-200000-e...

> Emissions from road transportation are the most significant contributor, causing 53,000 premature deaths, followed closely by power generation, with 52,000.

I'm sorry, but it's not possible to know how many fewer people would die each year in the entire country if we did not drive gas-powered cars. It's not possible to tie a case of lung cancer to the fact that cars exist. "If only we drove electric cars charged by solar plants, grandpa would have lived 7 more years!" No, it doesn't work that way. Even if you strapped masks to everyone's face that measured the fumes they breathed from birth to death, you couldn't make a statement like, "If we didn't use fossil fuels, Bob Smith would have lived 5 years longer."

By the way, how about the greatly increased life expectancy brought on by the amenities of modern life made possible by the use of fossil fuels? You know, abundant varieties of food in-and-out-of season, medicines, transportation, HVAC, communciations... the list goes on and on.

If you want to go back to the frontier lifestyle, be my guest. People didn't live very long back then, and life was very hard.

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