<Weekend Open Thread (and a link to HO v. Econbrowser)The Oil DrumA Discussion of Friedman's "Gas Pump Geopolitics">

184 comments on Stories from around the country

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magwitch on April 30, 2006 - 12:11am Permalink | Subthread | Comments top
Best way to not get addicted is to never try it in the first place.  I can watch with glee as my relative wealth grows considerably, but it's short-lived, knowing full well if things get bad I get swept along with the tides.  So, no, no impact on me since my monthly transportation budget is usually the cost of 2 round trip bus fares to the airport.

But here in Denver, the public transit is pretty good, and foreclosures(and our economy) are pretty bad.  There are noticeably more RTD riders than usual -- and most of them poor and ethnically diverse.  This is a bit distorted as a measurement, though, because the percentage of people using our transit system was originally so small that even 1% of trips being rerouted has a dramatic impact on ridership.

An informal census of parking lots, stoplights, and the traffic at the airport doesn't countenance any obvious divergence from normal behavior whatsoever.  I'm convinced significant demand destruction is an impossibility until prices get dramatically higher than this.  Demand is still up marginally(~0.5%) YoY, indicating some population/wealth growth and some decreased demand per capita, but China, India, and supply constraints are doing juuuust fine to make up the difference.

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fleam on April 30, 2006 - 12:31am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
You know those airplanes you fly on use oil too right?
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magwitch on April 30, 2006 - 12:40am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Thank goodness it does, though only about 9% or so.  Believe me, if I end up with less business travel as a result of oil prices, I couldn't be happier, but it's just an expense of the companies so far.
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fleam on April 30, 2006 - 12:56am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
???????????

Word salad.

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magwitch on April 30, 2006 - 1:04am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Let me try again:

I am glad that airplanes consume oil, although only roughly nine percent of what comes out of any given barrel with current refining practices.  If oil prices continue to increase, I may not need to travel as much for my employment due to price constraints, but they do not affect me currently.  That would make me happy because I could stay home and live my life.

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fleam on April 30, 2006 - 1:13am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Oh, OK.

There are certain subversive anti-American websites where you can calculate your "energy footprint" and flying increases it immensely.

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westexas on April 30, 2006 - 8:50pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
What I found interesting about the NYT article was that just about the only people who had curtailed their driving were the ones who were financially incapable of buying gasoline.  

Note that the  guy in the Pacific Northwest, who was trying to find a commuting partner to offset the cost of his 40 mile roundtrip commute, had zero responses to a Craiglist ad.

I suspect that this is, by and large, the pattern that we will see across the whole country.  You can pry their fingers away from their car keys when they can't afford to put gas in the tank.

Back to the Energy Tax idea:  let's tax energy consumption to pay for Social Security/Medicare, rather than taxing the wages of lower and middle income Americans.

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