When I was 18 gas was a quarter a gallon and I made $1.25 or 5 gallons per hour.

20th century thinking: regime change to guarantee that other countries sell us cheap oil.

21st century thinking: regime change to guarantee that other countries don't use up all the cheap oil before we can.

Sigh.

Yglesias has an odd view on what counts as "productive". While "visits to grandma's" may be one use for subsidized gas, it's mostly another useful area for Chinese economic growth. The Chinese government has decided that their economy needs to be a consumer economy - they're going to need to sell things to each other when the US disappears as a sales target. Cheap gasoline fueled that transformation in the US (the American auto industry is THE classic example of "selling things to one another"), and the Chinese are using it in a similar fashion to the way that the US did.

Matt may think there are "more useful" things they could be spending their money on (though that's not what his phrasing would indicate), but leaving it in "people's pockets" is kind of an absurd statement - does he have a clue about how the Chinese economy even works? I'm only a layman and I can recognize the absurdity of that statement.

When in doubt, blame California.

Mike: I publicly blame California.
Next thing you know, there's an earthquake.
Draw your own conclusions!

PS hope mike, rob, robert, and all out in cali are ok.

Man next thing you know they'll be subsidizing their agriculture!!

In the U.S., we don't really subsidize gas. Unless there is a drop of corn ethanol in it, of course. In that case, sure.

Anyone wonder why the price of corn is so high? (Hint: China!)

U.S. Energy Bill Showers Tax Breaks on Oil Drillers, Utilities

By Jim Efstathiou Jr.

July 29 (Bloomberg) -- The energy bill Congress is set to pass today will spread $14.5 billion in tax breaks among hundreds of U.S. companies.

Exxon Mobil Corp., ConocoPhillips and other oil and gas producers get incentives to drill wells in the deepest waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Utilities including Southern Co. and American Electric Power Co. gain support for building coal and nuclear plants, and power-line owners such as American Transmission Co. benefit from tax changes. A mandate to boost the amount of corn- based ethanol in gasoline aids Archer Daniels Midland Co.

``There are a lot of pigs at the trough and the pigs got fat,'' said Philip Verleger, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics in Washington. ``It's the way politics works in the United States.''

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=a1eDReAgtETw&refer=news_index

Oh, but we don't really subsidize gas.

Dumbass.

"Anyone know offhand how much oil product the armed services are blowing through running missions over Iraq?"

I read somewhere the consumption of fuel by the US Armed Forces (therefore not just Iraq) amounted to roughly 20-25% of the country's "needs".

I guess it only counts as a subsidy if it is aimed at the retail price.

The funny thing about China's plans is that they will be exactly where we are in about sixty years.

don't have a link, sorry.... but I read recently that the US military - if it was a separate country - would rank 38th in a list of all countries in oil/gas consumption.

In short, our military uses A LOT of oil!!

IOZ: Holy Knesset, what a lovely place.

SanFranSicko causes many earthquakes, yes. But I think it's a little unfair to credit homosexuals with ALL the earthquakes. That part of the "homosexual agenda" is shared by many heterosexuals. There's enough earth to quake for everyone, all right?

-But, when in doubt, blame the Chinese!

-As everyone knows, homosexuals cause earthquakes.

It has come to my attention that the right wing of any nation spawned mostly by Europeans has never, in the history of fucking time, found any significant malign phenomenon, anthropological or natural, secular or sacred, to be the full and complete fault of straight white males, ever. Not. Fucking. Once.

To pull the "universal rightwinger" theme of the previous thread into this (a better term might be Thom Hartmann's "con" for this particular kind of conservatism, or just aristocratic backer), a rightwing populace has always found that ever problem it has ever had that has human agency (and some that don't!) is the cause of one or more individuals outside of itself.

You'd think it would just become fucking tedious.