Monday, May 12, 2008

Gas Tax Plan



PLEASE USE THE FORM ON THE LEFT AND SIGN UP TODAY AND JOIN THE FIGHT ON THE GAS TAX. OR DOWNLOAD THE PETITION HERE

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

We are paying $3.79 per gallon of gas. A little relief would certainly be welcome. Most people here in the Chenango, Delaware, & Otsego county areas have to drive a distance to get anywhere. I drive 28 miles one way to work. It will be a sad day when I can't afford to drive to work. Our government, I believe, could have capped the gas prices at say $2.50 per gallon. We can help other countries but our government can help it's own people. That's pretty sad.
Alternat fuels would definitely be welcome as long as the people who make them can make them affordable. Feels like we're "Going to Hell in a handbasket" to me.

Anonymous said...

Be nice if we could all sign the petition. But due to limited space on your server we cannot get through to send our vote to sign the petition. Sad.

MaryM said...

Whoppee!! Higher gas prices after Labor day thanks to the taxes being added on. Just in time for the home oil heating season too & we pay tax on that too.Then we'll have the telephone,electric & food bills probably higher to adjust for thier higher gas prices which are passed down to us(of course)Local government & school taxes going up to cover thier gas bills. I live in rural Greene county to shop at more than 1 store, I have a 50 mile round trip to Albany or 30 mile round trip to Catskill. No public transportation so the car is our lifeline. I wonder how much more it will cost to have the driveway plowed so we can get to Doctor's appointments.The merchants thought last Christmas was bad,wait till this year. Who is going to have any money left unless you max out your credit cards.Mr. Tedisco,we need action not this laughable tax holiday. Go after the Oil companies & foreign governments(Saudi Arabia) It's time to put up or shut up!!! My cow is dead,I don't need your bull.It's time for the Federal & State governments do what they are VOTED in & PAIDED for. Once upon a time we were the Empire state,not any more. Now, I know how the Romans felt when Rome was burning & Nero was fiddling. Our Federal & State governments are fiddling & the people are going down in flames.

Anonymous said...

It needs a vote; up or down.

This is to be decided by our Representation & not by one person - Sheldon Silver.

Bob

cuda said...

A gas tax holiday is the wrong policy. Let's have some long term thinking on this for a change. Cheaper gas just prolongs our addiction to foreign oil. It's time to stop sending our money to Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc. to feed our addiction.

A better long term policy would be raise gas taxes -- but offset those higher gas taxes with a cut in the income tax. That would encourage us to use more efficient cars and/or mass transit.

Until we break our addiction to oil, we will keep sending our money overseas -- so that the country we leave our children and grandchildren will be a lot poorer (and a lot hotter thanks to global warming).

Anonymous said...

What an utterly terrible idea. A more responsible idea would be to give an income tax break to people in the lower tax brackets so they can more easily find the money to trade their cars to ones that run on less gas, or move closer to work, et cetera.

This level of irresponsibility is turning me into a Democrat.

Anonymous said...

The same people who favor small government and "letting the market work" now want to switch to communism on gas prices. Can't have it both ways - looks to me like there's going to be a significant "market adjustment" over the next few years as the era of cheap oil forces some painful changes on our development patterns, transportation choices, and the "big box" economic model based on cheap gas and products from halfway around the world.

Anonymous said...

Forget the gas tax holiday; a gas tax hike would be more appropriate.

The gas tax is supposed to pay for road construction and maintenance, but right now, it covers much less than that (around 70% if I recall correctly). The rest comes from other sources. In other words, the taxes I pay subsidize someone else's driving habit. As a fiscal conservative, I resent that.

Besides, the correct response to high gas prices is a reduction of demand. An economic disincentive like an increased gas tax would be a good start.

Anonymous said...

Right on Jim. Let's get this gas tax situation settled. A cap is very reasonable.

What is the great plan the government has with all of this extra revenue anyway? I think the excess $'s already collected should be directed to conservation programs and incentives. We are in an Energy crisis and no one is acting like it. The demand for oil world-wide is greatly accelerating and we need to do our part to mitigate this. Conservation plans should be implemented and gas mileage minimums on all vehicle should be pushed to very aggressive levels. Incentives for hybrids should be continued. Anything and everything we can do to mitigate oil usage should be done NOW.

Anonymous said...

What a stupid idea.

Does anybody really think that prices will go down the full amount of the tax? The gas stations already know how much gas people buy when the price is what it is now.

But you can bet that the price will go up every penny when the holiday is over. We need long-term solutions, not short-term pandering.

Unknown said...

The best solution for our own country would be to drill for our own oil. The best solution against higher gas prices would be to increase supply, not demand, you can only decrease demand by so much. Higher gas taxes is oppressive. Some people in this state cannot afford a $30k+ hybrid, a lot of people in this state do not have access to mass transit. You would need to reduce more than just the income tax burden for low income families to be able to afford a hybrid.

We get 2/3rds of our oil from Canada and Mexico, after that comes unfriendly countries. We are also importing gasoline because we do not have enough refineries to make enough petroleum products for all of our uses. Our country demands 6 different blends of gasoline, every time a refinery has to shutdown & reconfigure the process for another blend, supply suffers. One barrel of oil makes gas, fuel oil, cleaning products, lubricants, material for paving roads, plastics, it is a product that has been used so much because of it's cost, it's many uses and because it is a product that expands in volume through processing. Most products decrease in volume through processing. The last time the building of a refinery was tried, the process lasted 9 years of litigation and ended in the company giving up because it could not obtain the 800 necessary permits.

As a country, since 1985, our increase in demand has increased 40%, while our production of oil has decreased by 30%. We want to get off of oil but are anti-nuclear, we want to preserve our land and not clear cut but yet we choose wind power, solar power & ethanol for alternative choices that require large amounts of clear cut land. We are shooting ourselves in the head with the backwards policies that contradict each other.

Temporary increase in oil production, leading into a nuclear/hydrogen based solution, would probably be our most viable choice. With all the jokes that we throw at the French, France is run on over 70% nuclear power. Their electricity rates are near $0.16 per kWh. Bi-products of Nuclear facilities include radioactive waste and hydrogen. The hydrogen can be harvested and used for hydrogen fuel cells which can power vehicles. There are newer radioactive waste recycling processes that can greatly decrease the amount of waste, as well as nearly eliminate any plutonium that is created. But in order to get Nuclear and Hydrogen , we need to decrease tax rates for oil companies so they can survive, transfer a large portion of subsidies from oil and clean burning coal to nuclear and hydrogen.

The oil companies are not the problem, our government, other governments and radical environmental groups that threaten and slow every progress with lawsuits are the problem. Exxon Mobile has a profit margin of 11%, a standard margin of profit for most business in any industry. Not to mention the customer base that oil companies have. EVERYONE is a consumer of oil, unless you live in a log cabin out in the middle of the woods with no modern amenities. No plastic, no car, or no electricity. A lot of the price of a gallon of gas is tax, tax, tax. How would you like to pay a tax rate of nearly 49%? Exxon Mobile paid $9.3 billion in taxes for it's first quarter this year, that is 49% of their income. Every tax that a business receives is passed onto the cost of the product that a company offers. Venezuela has nationalized a lot of their oil fields, they stole them from the original owners of those fields and they just passed a 50% tax on all foreign exported oil, that's a 50% tax that we have to pay for. Oil companies take a huge risk when they deal with foreign nations and place their investments in those countries, in order to offer us the energy that we need to sustain our way of living.

A State Assemblyman can have an influence on our taxes. A tax holiday is nice, but it would be even better to see them permanently reduced or eliminated. We are taxed enough!