Anyone (Epecially a Presidential Candidate) who Supports the Gas Tax Holiday is Stupid

It immediately reeked of shortsightedness and pandering to middle class voters: "Lets suspend some of the federal gas tax to give consumers a break this summer!" Afterall, gas sure got 'spensive didn't it!

Just a few minutes worth of thought about this plan will reveal two practical problems, and one fundamental one:

Practical issue 1: The rebate would knock 18 cents off the price of a gallon of gas. However, oil companies would surely swoop in and just raise their prices a bit. Not the full 18 cents, but a bit- to capture some of that slack. So for all intents and purposes, part of it would be a direct subsidy to the oil companies.

Practical issue 2: The government doesn't really have the money to do this! The national debt is the highest it's ever been; what room do we have to spend any more money on a program like this? The money would be added directly to the national debt, which would just have to be paid back later anyway. If it was phrased as a "loan to consumers to buy gas this summer, which they'd later have to pay back with interest", do you think it'd be as popular?

Furthermore, the money collected from the gas tax goes directly to maintaining highways and bridges. Am I the only one who's read countless articles about how tons of bridges are unsafe from needing urgent maintenence?

And finally:
Fundamental problem: It's completely economically backwards! This would merely encourage us to keep using more oil, and higher demand with the same supply leads to one thing: higher prices!

So, if you know someone (especially a presidential candidate) who supports this sort of thing, you at least know that their grasp of economics is tenuous at best, and damaging at worst.

What your TV will be like in five years

A Tivo (or other DVR) is one of those items that you simply can’t do without once you are used to it. It’s a game changer, plain and simple. It completely changes the way you interact with your television; you can now watch whatever you want at your convenience. And... and! Those pesky commercials? A quick tap of the fast foward button makes short work of them. I haven’t watched a commercial in the better part of four years.

Unfortunately, those pesky commercials are what pays for all of your television shows (except of course for HBO, Showtime, and, for all you perverts out there, Cinemax). TV as we know it doesn’t exist without commercials, and I’m sorry to say, but the fast-foward party simply can’t last forever. I am not sure how many households in the US have DVR boxes. But I garauntee that when that number gets high enough, TV is going to change.

The future is going to be the On Demand feature that you’ve learned to appreciate over the years on your digital cable. Five years from now, everything you watch is going to be via the On Demand menu. Every show that would have otherwise aired that day, on every channel, will be available thru the On Demand system. It will be just like your Tivo, except everything’s housed on the cable company’s server instead of a little one hooked up to your TV. So, you’ll maintain the Tivo-like ability to call up any show anytime. However, when a commercial comes on, you’ll quickly notice that the fast forward button has been deactivated, and you are forced to watch it until the show starts back up.

The only reason this hasn’t happened yet is becuase there are still enough people out there who don’t have DVRs. But when your garden variety Walmart shopper in Frog Balls, Alabama finally gets his DVR and stops watching the Chevy Silverado commercial, that will be the straw that broke regular TV’s back, and the cable companies will do what it takes to make the forced commercial thing happen. So next time Uncle Frank tells you that he doesn’t need a DVR becuase he doesn’t watch that much TV anyway (when you know full well that he watches several hours worth a night, and that’s just reruns of Law and Order), rather than try and talk some sense into him, just tell him he’s right. Let the rest of us enjoy our DVRs a little longer. Forced commercials are coming; it’s just a matter of when.