DISPATCHES by Hank Kalet: Washington’s proposals to ease the burden of increased gas prices are short-term solutions.
By: Hank Kalet
Do the math.
Americans make up about less than 5 percent of the world’s population. We own less than 2 percent of the world’s known oil reserves. And yet we use about a quarter of all refined oil.
The reason is that we like to drive, feel it’s our birthright. The great American myth focuses on the open road, on the ability to get in our cars and go anywhere we want at anytime "These two lanes will take us anywhere," Bruce Springsteen sings in "Thunder Road" and we are loath to give it up.
But it’s an addiction with a serious cost. The more we drive and the bigger our cars grow the more gas we consume. And as demand for oil rises, we are forced to seek out new supplies often looking to the world’s more dangerous places for the crude needed to sate our oil addiction.
The result? Gas prices pushing $3 in central New Jersey and a lot more elsewhere.
On Tuesday, according to the AAA Fuel Price Finder, the average gas price in the Kendall Park area was $2.87 a gallon, with the average cost to fill a 15-gallon tank pegged at $42.96. That was up from $38.23 a month ago and $31.19 a year ago an $11.77 increase since May 2005 to fill the tank. (Prices are little higher in the Monmouth Junction, Dayton and Jamesburg, but a hair lower in Cranbury.)
The increase is forcing changes in the way local residents live.
Carolyn Rocca, for instance, who lives at the Monmouth Mobile Home Park, told our reporter earlier this month that her family is cutting back on visits to relatives in Pennsylvania and New York and finding ways to reduce the number of trips they take locally. "We have older, midsize cars and we can’t afford to buy something more fuel efficient, so we just have to budget," she said.
Jamesburg resident Phil Sudowsky, a contractor, was pretty blunt about the impact or rising gas prices. After filling up his Ford pickup, "I have no money for anything else."
All of this has triggered a political free-for-all, a "battle," as the New York Times wrote in a late-April editorial, "to see which political party can out-pander the other on the subject of gasoline prices."
Republicans have floated proposals for a $100 gasoline rebate (now off the table), an ill-conceived suspension of environmental rules and (as always) drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve. Among the Democratic proposals is an equally ill-conceived suspension of the federal gas tax.
Taken together, the proposals might push prices down, but only a tick, and at a greater long-term cost dirtier air and water and a bankrupt road fund than our pandering politicians are willing to admit.
And both are calling for investigation into why gas prices have been rising so quickly. I have no love for the oil companies, but I doubt that they’re the sole culprits here. Yes, oil companies’ profits have been huge and they do receive significant federal subsidies, but even if we tax excess profits (if we can agree on what they might be) and kill the subsidies, we’re still left with the same basic problem.
Americans use far too much oil. We have to cut demand by altering our driving habits, finding alternate ways to get around, by boosting fuel economy standards significantly and spending more on mass transit (and not just on large-scale commuter trains, but on urban bus systems and local shuttle bus services like the one proposed in South Brunswick, among other possible options).
Just as important if the politicians were serious about addressing the very real pain being felt by Americans at the bottom of the economic spectrum would be to move away from our laissez-faire economics toward something fairer.
Working families face a problem greater than gas prices, the New York Times wrote in April.
"It’s their vulnerability to the price increases, which results from stagnating wages and a lack of savings," the paper wrote. "If the Bush administration had devoted as much political capital in the past five years to wage and job growth initiatives as it has to cutting taxes for the wealthy, these struggling families would be better able to weather higher prices at the pump."
A change in priorities is in order. Too bad the folks in Washington have little more to offer than sound bites and pandering.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press. His e-mail is [email protected].