Have any Republicans said: "Well, what about Europe's gas prices" yet?

Yes, Europe does have higher gas prices than we do.


But...

Their higher gas prices help pay for infrastructure, universal health care, welfare, etc.


Our higher gas prices...

Help put money in tax shelters in the Cayman Islands owned by the oil companies.

Europe doesn't exist as far as Repubs are concerned.

And getting Americans pissed off at them by saying it's all their fault.

How dare their economies and their people rise out of poverty, grow and prosper and use the same resources that we do driving up demand and the prices :sarcasm:

unlike Americans.

cities so that people can walk to access most necessary goods and services, or at least use some form of public transportation or a bicycle to do so.

we are most wasteful people in the world, when are we going to change that?

...AND the government used the money for the same purposes that the
Europeans use it for, we'd have immaculately maintained roads, plus a few
other benefits we can only dream of.

you really don't need a car to live in most European cities. But in the USA, there are only a handful of locations where that can be done (NYC, SF, and, uh, i'm thinking....)

where you're driving to, anyway! Europeans generally don't agree with bulldozing a stand of trees to build a parking lot.........

I was in a huge Auchan store recently, had to be about 100,000 sq. ft., and the parking lot was under the store. They even supplement the regular public transportation to the store with their own red buses, which run on the hour to various outlying neighborhoods.

dealing with a controversial issue here in our city, the results were telling.

About 70% of my students this semester were international students (mostly from Korea and China, but some from other countries as well), because they had used fall term to work through the Applied English Center, so they couldn't take English 101 in the fall as most first term freshmen do.

Of my international students, all but a few wrote their research papers about our city's abysmal public transportation system. They all come from places where public transportation is convenient and inexpensive, but here they can't get around at all, because they don't have cars, and our bus system is terrible. The ones that can afford to end up buying cars almost immediately, but the ones who can't afford cars (most of them) end up cut off from goods, services, and social and entertainment opportunities.

We have had a city bus system here for only 6 years, and the service is so inconvenient that it takes a minimum of 1 hour 20 minutes to make a round trip that would take about 35 minutes walking. (Of course, people are not always able to walk.) Some round trips take two or three hours (since the bus runs are so infrequent), and require several transfers and 20-minute waits to complete, so they end up taking even longer.

When I used to have to take the bus to get to a doctor's appointment, I had to block off a 6-hour span of time, even though I could walk the route round trip in 1 1/2 hours (which I used to do when I wasn't handicapped by ruptured discs and plantar fasciitis). Now my doctor's office has moved even farther away, so I can't even take the bus there, since the closest stop is over a half mile from my doctor's office, and I can no longer walk that far, even with my cane. I had to buy a car two years ago because I can't walk long distances any more, and the bus system is so useless.

Now, though, because of budget shortfalls, the city is talking about reducing our bus service by 50%! One reason the only people who use the bus are the ones who can't drive or don't own a car is that it is so inconvenient to use it. I would still use the bus if it were at all possible, but it just isn't.

A recent survey showed that 3/4 of the people who ride the bus in our city make under $25,000 a year. Those who own cars regularly write to the local paper complaining that they don't want their tax money paying for a bus they don't use. Of course, the tax money of the bus-riders has been subsidizing car-owners all along, but that doesn't matter to these selfish car owners.

Considering that gas prices are going to keep going up and that we are heading toward peak oil, and considering that global warming has finally gotten into people's awareness as a real problem, you would think that the city commissioners and the citizens of our city would realize that public transportation is the only sane route to follow, but of course they can't think that far into the future. They are going to kill our bus system, even though ridership has increased 5-fold in its short (6-year) life span, and when time comes to reestablish it, as is inevitable, they will have to start from scratch to rebuild it.

I feel sorry for people who must drive distances to their jobs (like my sister, an 8th-grade English teacher who has a 1-hour+ round trip commute to the school where she works)--or even those who drive for a living--but if gas prices in the US had not been subsidized by taxpayers--including those who can't afford to buy cars--and had instead been allowed to rise to the same level that gas proces reached long ago in Europe, we probably would have a much more efficient public transportation infrastructure, and city zoning laws would not have put essential goods and services so far away from residential areas that no one could reach them without vehicular transportation.

Reading my international students' research papers about our lousy public transportation system is an exercise in frustration.

I live in Stoke-On-Trent in the Midlands. Between buses and taxis, you really don't need to drive to get around the city. A lot of people still do because Britain is this weird melange of American and European culture but they don't need to. I also know that my father, who lives in Sussex and works in London, only uses his car on weekends. He buses to the train station each morning, takes the train into London and uses teh tube (subway) to get around during teh day. A lot of people do the same.

Support gas prices as well?

for a repub it is PROFITS UBER ALLES and I GOT MINE, F YOU

From the BBC - June 20, 2000:




Now from petrolpices.com


Now these are all in liters, which are just over a quart. 100 pence make a pound, and one pound is just shy of two dollars right now. In the 1990s, it was more like one pound = $1.50, I think.

4 liters = 3.79 gallon

1.13 x 1.6 = 1.808 x 3.79 = $6.85 ... so today's UK gas prices would have been $6.85 per gallon with the 1990s exchange rate.

Is that correct?

Since Europe and the UK started with HIGH gasoline tax rates, the price increase, as a percentage, is no where near the US price increase.

For example, price in 2000 was about $1.29 a gallon in the US. Gasoline Taxes in my home state of Pennsylvania was 49.9 cents a Gallon (Including Federal Gasoline taxes). Gasoline is NOW $3.85 a gallon with the same tax rate or an increase of $2.56 a gallon. That is a 300% increase (3.85/1.29=2.98 or just almost a 300%%.

US Gasoline Tax by State in 2002:
http://www.energy.ca.gov/gasoline/statistics/gas_taxes_by_state_2002.html

Gasoline taxation in 2008:
http://www.floridastategasprices.com/tax_info.aspx

UK's Tax rate is $4.84 per gallon:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_tax#Europe

Take the $1.29 less the 45.9 cents a gallon tax rate in 2002 you come to .69 cents a gallon as the price per gallon WITHOUT taxes in 2002. Add the $4.29 you come to $4.98 per gallon.

Take the $3.85 less the 49.9 cent a gallon tax rate in 2008 you come to gasoline only price of $3.35 per gallon. Add the British tax rate of $4.29 per gallon the price is $7.64 per gallon.

Thus the price today in Britain is approximately $7.64 per gallon. In 2002 it was only about $4.29 or $3.35 increase in price per gallon or just a 180% increase (7.64/3.35=1.78 or 178%) as opposed to the almost 300% increase in the USA.

In affect Gasoline prices have not even doubled in Europe, while their have TRIPLED in the USA. This is do to the affect of high gasoline taxation. Since our prices, including gasoline taxation, were so much lower than Europe's, the increase as a percentage is greater (Gasoline taxation tends to be at a fixed rate, thus tax rate, as a percentage of total gasoline price, also dropped do to the increase in the cost of gasoline).

This was Known affect of Europe's gasoline tax system even before 9/11. Europe, do to its high gasoline taxation, can withstand a gasoline price increase more then the US. Thus Europe is NOT hurting as much as the US, AND do to the fact it used less oil per person can more easily pay more per gallon then can the US.

If prices get to $10 a gallon, basically a 10 fold increase, can the US afford it? In Europe that would finally be over twice what they had been paying in 2002. Thus Europe can more easily adjust to paying more then we can because they always have.

Plus, again, the consideration of the exchange rate.

Two hundred per cent increases in the cost of oil, we are experiencing 300 per cent - as the American dollar is so unstable and oil has to be paid for with the Euro which is more secure.

And every time our Treasury bails out another failing financial institution, the dollar devalues yet again, with a resulting increase in the cost of gas.

We're bailing out the investor class, and everyone pays - especially those of us who can't go out and plop down $30k on an electric car.

I lived in Q-Roo (Mexico) for about eighteen months in 2003--04, and even in its relatively impoverished state, one could take a taxi from anywhere in Cancun (the old city-- not the crappy tourist part) to anywhere else in town for the equivalent of two dollars.

Two bucks a little expensive for you? Then try the bus... again-- anywhere in the city to anywhere else in the city for the equivalent of fifty cents.

It was unbelievable to me that having a car was something I just didn't have to concern myself with. But of course, on returning to the States (North Texas in particular) getting a car was priority number one again.

One simply cannot live and work in the DFW area (live in Ft. Worth, work in Arlington) without private transportation. And to me, that seems one of the largest crimes of this century-- that we've allowed ourselves to be deluded into accepting that "cars are necessary and public transportation is just for... well, you know-- them"