Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Inspired (as I often am) by either the insights or the foolishness of a guest post at Judith Curry’s always-provocative blog, I decided to take a look at the relationship between fuel price and miles driven. My inspiration came from my amusement at the guest author’s use of the following graph to establish a relationship between fuel cost and how much people use their cars. I think a relationship exists, but the graph used by the author doesn’t show it. Figure 1 shows that graph:
Figure 1. Per capita fuel use, compared to the fuel price, for the OECD countries. SOURCE
Now, it certainly looks like there’s a clear relationship there, but that’s an illusion. My objection to the graph was, the countries divide into two groups. On the bottom right you have the European OECD countries, plus Japan. Plus one fish.
On the top left, you have the US, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. What’s not to like?
Well, ignoring fuel price for the moment, who would you think would drive more miles—a citizen of the US, or a citizen of Japan? An Aussie, or a Belgian? A Canadian, or an Italian? So all the guest author has shown in that graph is that the folks in large countries, with miles and miles between cities, drive more than Europeans and Japanese.
But of course, I couldn’t leave it there, so I linked to the following lovely graph of automobile use in the US that I ran across during my research. It shows, year by year since 1956, how many miles Americans have driven, and what the gas price was during that year.
Figure 2. Miles driven compared to the fuel price. Click to embiggen. SOURCE
Now that shows some very interesting patterns. The main oddity I noticed is that there is what might be termed a price shock effect—in the year of a big jump in prices, for example 1974, the mileage driven drops compared to the previous year. But then look what happens from 1974 to 1978 … the price stays stable, but the number of miles driven each year goes up steadily, without reversal.
But of course, I couldn’t leave it there. I digitized the data, to see what kind of relationships I could understand and reveal through further analysis. And as usual, I was surprised by what I found.
First, taking the data as it is given, there is no statistically significant relationship between the two variables, pump price and miles driven. The R2 is only 0.03. (“R2” is a measure of the relationship between two datasets, where an R2 of 1.0 indicates a perfectly linear relationship between the two, and an R2 of 0.00 indicates no relationship. So an R2 of 0.03 is … well … pathetic. So as far as a direct relationship between prices and miles driven, not happening.
Once I saw that, I wondered, well, what if I include a temporal trend in the linear regression? The way that I usually do that is simply to include the date as a variable. And to my surprise, the R2 went from 0.03 up to 0.98 … Figure 3 shows an emulation (multiple linear regression result) of the number of miles that Americans drive, versus the value estimated based on year and pump price.
Figure 3. The emulation is a multiple linear regression, using the year and the pump price as independent variables, and the actual average miles driven by Americans as the dependent variable. R2 = 0.98
Dang, sez I … that’s pretty impressive.
But of course, I couldn’t leave it there. A fixed annual increment, a simple trend like I used, is just a way to understand the data. It’s not an explanation involving some plausible mechanism. And more to the point, I also didn’t like those two years up at the top right of Figure 3, which are 2009 and 2010. In those years, Americans drove about a thousand miles less than expected. So I though about why that might be, and even a bear of little brain would go “global financial meltdown, duh”. And that made sense overall as well, because how far I drive doesn’t just depend on the pump price. It also depends in part on how much money I have in my jeans. When I’m flush I drive more, and when times get hard, I drive less regardless of the price of gas.
So I thought that instead of using the year, I’d try using the per-capita GDP as the second independent variable. Figure 4 shows those results.
Figure 4. The emulation is a multiple linear regression, using the real per capita GDP and the pump price as independent variables, and the actual average miles driven by Americans as the dependent variable. R^2 = 0.98 GDP SOURCE
Yowzah! Now that’s what I call shaving with Occam’s razor. It turns out that pump price and per capita GDP do an excellent job of estimating the number of miles driven, with very little error.
So, what does the magic equation that gives us the excellent results shown in Figure 4 say about the relationship between miles driven on the one hand, and gas price and per capita GDP on the other?
Well, it says that for every twenty-five-cent increase in the pump price of gas, Americans drive about a hundred miles less. Gas price goes up, miles driven go down. Makes sense.
And it says that for every $430 increase in per capita GDP, Americans drive about a hundred miles more. Wealth goes up, miles driven goes up. Also makes sense.
Now, the “carbon taxes” I’ve seen discussed are on the order of $20-$30 per tonne of CO2. And by coincidence, $28 per tonne of CO2 emitted is equal to twenty-five cents per gallon of gasoline. So if a $28/tonne carbon tax is imposed on gasoline, how much less might Americans drive?
Well … a hundred miles less … wow, such a stupendous gain, be still, my beating heart …
And how much actual change in our driving habits is a hundred miles less per year?
Well … since Americans drive about 10,000 miles per year, it’s a gigantic, massive reduction in miles driven of one percent.
And that, dear friends, is all the bang you get for your twenty-five-cent per gallon carbon based energy tax. A one percent reduction in miles driven. One freaking percent, and they want to impoverish the poor for that? Grrrr ….
So … what does this mean for the debate on carbon-based energy taxes?
First, it means that in the American situation, there is no way that the benefits of energy taxes are worth the cost. Why? Because the effect of a typical CO2-based energy tax on miles driven is minuscule, only a 1% reduction for a $28 per tonne of CO2 energy tax.
Next, a very slight increase in per capita GDP will nullify the energy tax entirely. Also by coincidence, it turns out that if the current per capita GDP goes up by about 1% (~$430), that will increase the mileage driven by 100 miles … so a 1% increase in per capita GDP will completely nullify a $28 per tonne of CO2 energy tax. And the GDP goes up by one percent all the time …
Next, it means that in order to have more than a one-year effect, the tax will have to continually rise.
The problem with a carbon based energy tax can be seen by thinking back to Figure 2, where I noted the “shock effect”, and how after the slight reduction in miles driven as a result of the 1974 big jump in pump price, after that one-year reduction the miles driven went right back to increasing year after year, with no change in the gas price.
So a one-time jump in the price will make little difference, just a one-year reduction in the miles driven. But by the next year or two, assuming that the per-capita GDP continues to rise as it has in the past, the miles driven will be rising again.
Next, it means that a carbon-based gasoline tax is wildly regressive. To see why, let me start with a slight digression, by bringing in a concept from accounting, that of “fixed”, “variable”, and “semi-variable” costs.
Fixed costs are those costs you can’t do anything about. The amounts are fixed, you can’t reduce them, you just have to pay them.. Maybe rent. Taxes.
Variable costs are costs that are entirely optional. Think maybe eating at restaurants. You don’t have to spend a penny on that if you don’t want to.
Semi-variable costs are costs that you can change, but you can’t eliminate entirely. These would be things like food costs. You can run them up or down, but you can’t eliminate them.
Now, think about the corresponding concepts as applied to the subject at hand—fixed, variable, and semi-variable miles driven.
Fixed miles are things like a commute to work. Short of changing your job or your residence, you can’t change that. You just rack up those miles every year.
Variable miles are things on the order of visiting Grandma in Arizona. You love to do it, but you don’t have to go.
Semi-variable miles are things like going to the post office to get your mail. You can cut the trips down, but not to zero.
What this graph shows me is that any energy tax on gasoline will hit the hardest on the poorest, the people who mostly use their car to get to work. The problem is not just that more of the wages of the poor go to energy, although that is also a problem.
But in addition to the higher percentage of their wages going to energy, the majority of their miles are fixed miles, so they can’t cut back on them. They have to drive them, so they have to pay the tax.
For the wealthy, on the other hand, lots of their miles driven are variable or semi-variable, so they can just scale down a bit. The energy tax means nothing to them. But for the poor, it can be a budget-buster.
This is one of the many reason why energy taxes are so regressive—because for the poor, fixed costs for everything squeeze them all the time, not just fixed fuel costs but also the other bills they have to pay every month. So when energy prices go up, Al Gore and James Hansen just cut back on visiting the grandchildren they love to talk about, no problem for them.
But the single mom whose gas budget barely covers getting to work, she can’t cut back on her gas use, it’s already cut to the bone. So when she pays the energy tax, she is forced to cut back on something for either the kids or herself.
And all of that for a pathetic 1% reduction in miles driven. That’s criminal.
Now please, folks, don’t insult my intelligence by claiming that it’s OK to harm the poor because of that well-worn fantasy, the fabulous claim that wealth redistribution will make it all OK. It won’t. Anyone who believes it will make it all OK has not spent enough time around government programs.
To start with, even the best-intentioned programs only reach a percentage of those most affected. Next, the poorer that people are, the less likely they are to hear about such programs. Think people living in apartments versus people living in their cars. Next, the paperwork required is all too often complex, confusing, and intrusive. Next, many of the poorest people are mistrustful of government. Also, immigrants are often equally fearful of government, and many don’t speak the language. Next, the people who end up getting the most benefits are often not those who suffered the most losses. Next, administering such a program requires a large expensive workforce of bureaucrats and paper pushers to make it function. And of course, they’re all Union, can’t be fired, plus we’ll be stuck paying these pluted bloatocrats their megabucks in retirement money ’til they shuffle off to a warmer place … and I’m not thinking Florida. Next, as with any government program, waste will consume more than you imagine. Think IRS conferences in Las Vegas and thousand dollar hammers. Next, parasitic rent-seekers like lawyers and consultants will be circling the honey-pot and making off with some of that good honey. And finally, there’s never been a government program that people didn’t scam, game, and cheat, so somewhere between a little and a lot of money will simply be stolen.
So no, wealth distribution will only make things worse, or on the best day with a following wind it might “break even” by taking from one bunch of the poor and giving to another bunch … and meanwhile the people at the bottom of the economic pile are hit the hardest. And whether you are a conservative or a liberal, that should appall you.
And finally … we’re going to create all that pain and create a giant bureaucracy and waste piles of money for a crappy 1% reduction in miles driven, a temporary reduction that will be wiped out by the next 1% increase in per capita GDP?
Really? That’s the brilliant plan? Screw the poor and the economy for a 1% reduction in miles driven?
Spare me. That’s more than foolish, that’s a crime against the indigent and everyone else in the country. Almost any other conceivable response to the imagined horrors of CO2 would be preferable. Taxes on energy are destructive and damaging to individuals, to businesses, to the environment, to the economy, and more than anything to the poor, and to turn it from mindless idiocy to criminal tragedy, there is nothing to show for it at the end of the day but a temporary 1% reduction in miles driven—from an energy tax, there’s no lasting gain, only lasting pain.
w.
DATA: The spreadsheet with the data and graphs is here.
[UPDATE] I just wondered, how much will the $28 per tonne of CO2 gasoline tax cost per year? Average fuel economy of the US fleet, cars and trucks, is about twenty mpg. Average person drives ten thousand miles, at twenty mpg that’s five hundred gallons. The tax at twenty-five cents per gallon on five hundred gallons is $125 per year.
In response to that tax, we can expect people to cut fuel use by 1%, or 5 gallons per year. Gas is around four bucks a gallon, so that’s $20 worth.
So the plan is to charge the average driver $125 per year in gas tax, and in response to that he’ll use $20 less gas, reducing his bill at the pump from $2,000 per year to $1,980 per year and cutting his CO2 emissions by a whacking great 1% … who thinks these plans up, and how can we catch them and stop them?
[UPDATE 2] I also got to wondering, just how much CO2 would a $28 per tonne of CO2 applied to gasoline consumption actually save? There’s 8.9 kg (19.6 pounds) of CO2 in a gallon of gasoline. Crazy but true, it’s the extra weight of the oxygen. So we’d be saving one whole percent of that, or .089 kg per gallon. Multiply that by the number of gallons of gasoline burned in the US, about 134E+9 gallons, and we end up with 0.01 gigatonnes (billion metric tonnes, E+9 tonnes) of CO2 saved.
And compared to a hundredth of a gigatonne, how large are the global CO2 emissions? Well, it’s about 9 gigatonnes of carbon C emitted per year, so as CO2 the mass is (16 + 16 + 12) / 12 of that to allow for the extra weight of the oxygen, or 33 gigatonnes of CO2 per year.
And the $28 carbon based energy tax would reduce that by 0.01 gigatonnes of CO2, which is a reduction of three hundredths of one percent (0.03%) … folks, have we truly gone so mad that such a trivial gain, three hundredth of one percent reduction in CO2 emissions, so small as to be absolutely unmeasurable, is used to justify this crazy tax?
“Well, in my experience, in Africa, people walk. They don’t even have the luxury of a bicycle, let alone rods to use it on! So, no roads, no bicycle, no car, no public transport, no beast and cart, what are the alternatives?”
Of course they do, because of reasons I stated above. Africa is completely different story and doesn’t have anything common to people in USA or other countries where everybody have chance to get good education.
“John says:
July 10, 2013 at 5:43 am
…some can’t just accept that car riding is a cultural thing not economical.”
That’s where you go astray John. Car usage by the average person anywhere is based almost entirely upon economic decisions made by the individual. Sure, there are cultural elements involved in the decision as to which car to purchase, or whether to even own one, but most of the decision process is based solidly on economics. You just don’t understand economics, apparently.
I purchase used cars because they’re cheaper to operate overall for the time I own them. My wife drives an all-wheel drive because she has to do extensive traveling in our winter weather. I also own an older SUV for the occasional hauling I have to do. I don’t care about the gas mileage on it because I only drive it a couple thousand miles a year. Hers is a smaller SUV for better gas mileage, but an SUV because she has to haul a lot of stuff. My older car is always the more comfortable of the three vehicles we own because we use it for longer trips. Etc. All of those choices were based on economic decisions. I even buy mostly white or silver vehicles because they don’t show our typical salt-spray dried winter slush as much, so they look better in winter generally, so I don’t have to run them through the car wash every other day to keep them looking decent.
Sure, cultural decisions are involved as well (clean car–dirty car?), but you vastly underestimate the degree to which nearly all decision-making regarding personal transport is based on economics.
Yowza Willis, slick as an acrobatic show. Instantly, most here will have seen that the graph was one of country size with the NZ folks an outlier and nothing to do with gas-price economics. But what you did next was magic and a total destruction of idiot carbon economics. This supports a theory of mine that economists all emigrated away from Europe over the last 20 years or so and left the London School of Economics and the rest adrift from their moorings, handing out asterisked PhDs. Not many of them seem to have come to North America, either. I think a comparison of the quality of learned papers of pre-control-knob times with today’s would show us how slovenly acceptable papers have become and the damage to all science that has been done by the grantophagus browsers. I strongly suggest you make a paper out of this for publication in an economics journal. I’m sure there are other faulty graphs of this kind, particularly in OECD-UN agenda driven papers. Your simplification of all climate models to a two variable equation is another of your enduring masterpieces. This can be judged of course by the droves of prominent control-knob critics that jump all over your stuff – a special higher form of peer review.
“Sure, cultural decisions are involved as well (clean car–dirty car?), but you vastly underestimate the degree to which nearly all decision-making regarding personal transport is based on economics.”
This contradicts conclusions what have made the author, that increase of price by about 8% will decrease millage by about 1%.
John, I’m going to guess that you live in a dense population fairly flat urban environment with a well developed public transportation system. You are basing your opinions on what you have available to you personally.
The problem is that for more than 80% of the United States your personal experience isn’t true. Most US cities do not have a well developed public transportation system. Rail travel has dropped dramatically over the years as cars are both cheaper and more convenient to use between rural locations in the US. Trains must always follow the same path and if you live off of that path or want to go somewhere off of that path it becomes a serious problem. And typically the distance from a train or bus station isn’t just 10 – 20 KM but usually much more.
I’ll give you specifics. I live 5 miles 8 KM from the nearest store the elevation change between me and the store is approximately 250 feet which isn’t horrible. But it does make riding more of an issue. The roads are rural which means you must ride the edge of the road with traffic. I work in a neighboring town and drive 28 miles 45 km per day to work with a 2300′ elevation change between my house and my work. So imagine biking down that mountain and back for 90 km a day of biking. We get 5 – 6 months with rain likely and possible and heavy rains in there along with snow. Again imagine biking in that. While there is a bus line it doesn’t come closer than about 1 km from my house and it doesn’t go near my work. It isn’t actually possible to crosslink between the 3 different bus lines to make it to work on time and I couldn’t make it home before the bus line stops running for the evening.
Now explain to my my options that I have besides driving a car to work. Oh and aside from the 2300′ elevation change I’m not all that different than a lot of people living in the US in terms of travel times or what is around me.
“John says:
July 10, 2013 at 7:51 am
Of course they do, because of reasons I stated above. Africa is completely different story and doesn’t have anything common to people in USA or other countries where everybody have chance to get good education.”
If someone has NO ALTERNATIVE to walking, WHAT ALTERNATIVE do they have? Lets not go down the education path, you are on a cycle track to failure there!
John,
You misunderstand the author’s point. An increase of the price of gasoline by 8% will be met by a decrease in expenditures (or decrease in savings or increase in borrowing which are the same thing just offset in time). However, economically I will decrease my expenditures somewhere other than driving to work. A person buying a used car doesn’t get to choose the energy efficiency of a 10 year old car. I will also drive to the store to buy food. My economic choices are that food and earning money are more important than dining out.
Now back to the single mom waitress with 5 kids. You decrease the amount of money in the wallets of everyone in the community by $200 per year (except that IRS agent). She is hit double because she is in a marginal field (where people cut expenditures first) and she has to pay more. What does she do? Does she go buy a brand new car with better mileage? Does she stop driving to work? Where does she cut her expenses? Do we raise her taxes to put in a bus system that will take her an hour to go the 10 miles to work? Do we require her to move to a city with much higher living expenses but a subway system? Do we give her a check based on the money extracted from the economy thereby teaching her children that wealth comes not from work but from the government? What are the consequences of your plan on that single mother?
I can’t even imagine trying to carry two carts worth of groceries, clothing and other miscellaneous goods back to a residence using “public transportation”. Yes, could rent a car but then there is the inconvenience and time cost of having to wait on car delivery and return especially if I need something on short order or frequently. Being able to hop in a vehicle anytime I want to and go to Wal-Mart, then Ross, then McDonald’s then Target then Barnes & Noble etc,etc none of which are anywhere close together and then having that automobile to put everything purchased into is a terrific convenience in addition to being efficient. This is a lifestyle that, unless experienced, is hard to fathom by Europeans and similar countries and not one that most here are willing to give up voluntarily. Even the Greenies only pay lip service to a restricted transportation lifestyle and would force it only on people other than themselves.
LamontT,
I live rather close to place where I work, the terrain is flat, the weather is rather rainy and cold in winter. Public transportation to my work is not convenient, therefore I switched to bike.
My first argument was that the size of USA doesn’t influence millage that much. Other factors like poor public transportation system, urban sprawl is reason why USA consumes much more fuel.
First, there were cheap petrol, than people could afford not to worry about distance, therefore they could afford to live far from their work place. This is the core reason, most of people live in cities, where the services and the work had to be close, but it is not true in USA, because fuel has been cheap and people could not to care about millage.
You talk, why You can’t, it is valuable information, I try to understand why there is situation that You can’t.
Rod Everson: “Car usage by the average person anywhere is based almost entirely upon economic decisions made by the individual.”
Hear, hear. Particularly when the value of most people’s time is taken into account, public intra-city transport is in most instances hideously inefficient. And this is from someone who went for most of his working life without owning a car. (After my first three I went for over thirty years before I bought my fourth.)
Sure, there are those to whom the cost would still be worth it if they paid the true (unsubsidized) cost. But in all but the absolutely largest cities, few people who take the bus would do so if they had to pay the full cost–even if they all had the money.
“John says:
July 10, 2013 at 8:17 am
This is the core reason, most of people live in cities,…”
No, that is incorrect! MOST people do NOT live in in cities.
If someone has NO ALTERNATIVE to walking, WHAT ALTERNATIVE do they have? Lets not go down the education path, you are on a cycle track to failure there!
As I sad: “There are always a choice. Just in many cases we don’t like the alternatives.”
They can not to go anywhere, it is alternative, but really bad one, therefore in most cases they choose to go. And there are always a question why You need to go somewhere. For example woman in Africa often spend much time collecting firewood, but solar panels would do the same trick, but they just don’t have money to buy it. It is question of luck of capital, because if they had it, they wouldn’t walk at all.
I was working in the southeast in the summer of 2008 when gas prices spiked, and one effect that was readily apparent was a temporary change in the composition of vehicle types being driven. There were just as many vehicles on the road, but fewer of the large pickup trucks.
Parking lots at work and in shopping malls seemed to be just as full, but many of the pickup trucks had been left at home and their place had been taken by cars of various makes and sizes.
I have to guess that many of the employees at the plant where I worked had multiple vehicles; and before the price spike they had taken the vehicle they were most comfortable with as their daily driver. If the vehicle they liked best was a truck, they took the truck. But after the price spike, they started using the vehicle in their personal fleet with the least fuel costs. This new pattern lasted until the price spike had passed, and then the usual pattern returned.
The American economy and lifestyle is built upon affordable go-anywhere, go-anytime-you-want transportation. America is no longer an industrial nation, it is a service economy; and if you take away some good part of our affordable go-anywhere go-anytime-you-want transportation, the service economy will suffer immensely.
John,
Equating capital with luck is extremely misguided. Capital is built through work. The capital in Europe and the US was not just found, it was built. I am not claiming the woman in Africa is not hard working, but we should not ignore the contributions of our fathers and grandfathers in building things that lasted long enough to build future capital (steam engines, internal combustion engines, roads, rule of law, etc). She is unfortunate enough to live in an area where almost all capital built for most of time was destroyed through war. However, the difference in total accumulated capital is not an issue of luck but culture.
Imagine building the NYSE in Nigeria during the 1800’s. That has been a huge tool used to direct wealth into generating capital. How much good would it have done in a society that constantly blows up any infrastructure they manage to build? Even if Nigeria had enough money to move everyone out of poverty (and their oil reserves are enough to basically do that) the culture there is more likely to blow it up than use it to build future income streams.
Education is not key here. Those living in Nigeria are not less educated than those in New York in the 1800’s.
Think of it another way. If you put a solar panel on every roof in Nigeria, how many would be smashed in 5 years?
The problem John is that the entire rural sprawl development in the US has happened over the years because there is plenty of land and people if given the choice don’t want to be squished into small areas. The US allows people to not be crammed up shoulder to shoulder.
But some thinkers seem to feel that everyone should live like you are advocating and FORCE people to live that way. With no regard for what the people themselves want. I personally don’t approve of that.
So yes in the US we have horrible public transportation infrastructure and people are not crammed into tightly packed urban areas but instead sprawl out into the countryside where they would prefer to live. And yes there are some who like the crammed and packed cities. I’m not one of them I spent months between jobs last time because I refused to look in the major cities for a job. I loathe how crammed with people they are.
The reality is that it isn’t possible to force people back into the cities now but it doesn’t stop others such as the green lobby from trying to force people to do that and abandon living in the countryside.
Willis,
Interesting analysis, but I think you need to include the effect of keeping the tax revenue neutral on the impacts you consider. I agree that taxes are bad things, but an energy tax is not necessarily the worst tax. Payroll taxes have much worse effects, especially on the working poor.
If all the proceeds of the carbon tax are used to reduce payroll taxes by a fixed dollar amount for each worker, then the effects are much different for the example you gave of the working mother. For the lowest paid workers, their payroll tax would be reduced by more than their energy costs. Also, unlike taxes, they also have the option to reduce energy costs over time by getting a more efficient car or moving closer to work.
Rod Everson says (July 10, 2013 at 7:24 am): “In other words, the U.S. has a gas pricing structure that more closely approximates a true “free-market” price…”
Rod cuts to the heart of the matter. In the US we live where we live because we don’t have to live close to work or school or stores or public transit. Most of the “problems” created by our choices are “solved” by the automobile. Europe is a more artificial environment created by artificially high fuel prices. This better suits some people like commenter John, which is fine, but is less suited for people like me and a number of other commenters, which is also fine.
John also seems to know what’s best for other people, which is still fine as long as we keep him (i.e. his US counterparts) out of public office, or better yet ensure that in any public office he holds he can’t make us do what’s “best” for us. Unfortunately we in the US have increasingly been electing people who know what’s best for us and we’ve given them the power to make it stick. 🙁
Steve,
If you raise the tax on gasoline but then reduce the payroll tax enough that everything is a wash then the miles driven probably won’t change at all. Citizens have already decided that they are best served by spending x dollars on gas. If you raise the cost of gas to x+$200 and then give them an extra $200, they are probably going to spend x+$200 on gas and end up in the exact same position they were in previously.
This was on the news around here for a day or two. A study was done that showed owning a car was more important in finding a job then having a HS diploma. Why? Employers want to ensure you have a reliable way to get to work each and every day.
John says:
July 10, 2013 at 6:28 am
I have Kleenex if the tragedy is too much for you …
John, I’m a musician, and I used to think like you. When I was younger, I used to think that it was the audience’s fault if perchance they weren’t interested in my obviously fantastic music.
Took me a while to realize that if the audience didn’t like the music, that was not on the audience, it was on the musician …
I suspect that the reason your ideas aren’t resonating with the folks here is that you said:
Many people, myself included, have had it up to the eyeballs with well-meaning but clueless folks like yourself telling us or our friends “this will hurt, but you’ll benefit from it”. This seems to be a specialty of brain-dead “progressives” and your basic gormless Eurocrats. Not sure which if either of those groups you represent, but from this side it comes across very unpleasantly. The words I’d use to describe that attitude include arrogant, supercilious, ignorant, patronizing, and uncaring.
THAT is why folks aren’t listening to you, John. Because you’ve shown yourself to be all of those things. You advise that the poor should bike to work? Yeah, that’ll work fine for the woman waitressing from 4PM to midnight in the North Dakota winter, who drops off her two kids at a friends house before going to work and picks them up on the way home … I want to be there when you tell her that biking to work might hurt to start with, but that in the long run she’ll benefit from pedaling through snowdrifts at 1 AM with two kids strapped to her back, I could sell tickets to that show …
Do you see not only how clueless, but how actively, aggressively, patronizingly uncaring that is? You assume that everyone is perfectly free to make all these wonderful choices for the good of the planet, when mostly the poor have very, very limited choices. The waitress doesn’t have a choice of public transit, or biking, or buying a fuel efficient car. She’s got a clapped out old car she hates but can’t afford to replace … and you come along with your airy-fairy theories and you’re shocked that no one buys in to your Pollyanna nonsense?
The problem is not that you wanted to show us another perspective but nobody is interested.
The problem is that you’ve revealed your point of view, you’ve shown us your assumptions of your own superiority and god-given wisdom to direct others in the one true path … and people find your inner workings to be most arrogant and unpleasant.
w.
John said,
“However most poor people in Western World are poor because of bad decisions (for example, no attention to subjects in school, too much partying, using drugs, as well spending money where the money shouldn’t be spent.”
That statement shows how misslead you are in profiling the “poor”. There certainly isn’t any statistical relationship with making those bad decisions and being poor. People that are rich are probably more likely to make those “bad decisions” you mentioned than the poor. Why not get out of yourself and find out how you can help those poor climb out of poverty.
John says:
July 10, 2013 at 6:53 am
John, that’s either absolutely hilarious or destructively clueless, I can’t figure out which.
So when the ex-husband left the 20-year-old car behind, along with the kids and the unpaid bills, when he skipped out with the 20-year-old office temp … your claim is that the ex-wife and kids are not poor because they still have the 20-year old car?
What planet are you living on, John? It’s statements like that that have people howling in the aisles, either in laughter or outrage, I can’t tell from here …
w.
Steve Taylor says:
July 10, 2013 at 2:22 am
@Wayne Delbeke
“Wayne, Most Europeans don’t even know how big EUROPE is. I can fly for 5 hours east of the UK and still be in “Europe”. Most think it ends somewhere like Poland.”
Steve, I hitch hiked (a lot of walking, too) all over Western Europe as it was 50 years ago and managed to visit every country but Portugal and Finland. I found the countries quite small being from Canada and marvelled that there were all those wars between countries many of which could be dropped into Lake Superior (82,000km^2). The largest Canadian federal electoral riding-Nunavut (1,878,000 km^2 with one MP – member of parliament) is almost 4 times the size of the Western Europe of pre EU days (~500,000km sq). There are several electoral ridings in the Rocky Mountain regions in British Columbia that are far larger (Prince George-Peace River at 244,000km sq) than Switzerland (40,000km sq) with many times the potential skiing resources if they were developed. No offense, but when you are talking big, this is a little perspective.
John says:
July 10, 2013 at 7:19 am
Yes, that makes perfect sense. We don’t actually have to eat, that’s just an illusion that people need food.
We eat out of pure choice, because we don’t like the alternative …
And don’t get me started on optional breathing …
….
Do you actually read what you write before you send it to an unwilling world, John?
w.
I grew up in west Texas. My waitress mother wouldn’t have had to bike through snow during her ~7 mile commute. There were some 110+ degree days though. Although I guess we should have ponied up and traded in our 20 year old Buick LeSabre to buy whatever the equivalent of a Prius was back then. The rest of the time we could bike. If someone died of heat stroke that would just fall under the “may” part of “they may even benefit” part of the earlier posts.
Willis, I for one particularly appreciate your incessant demonstrations that high energy policies are detrimental to the poor (possibly the first time I have ever used incessant in a positive sense) in daily life and as far as the environment is concerned.