Americans Need To Pay More For Petrol, page 3

Originally posted by freemarketsocialist
Or 'gas' as they call it.

I find it very annoying to see Americans complaining about the price of petrol. Why do Americans think they deserve cheap petrol? The rest of us pay a fortune for petrol and we always have.

Why does America get it so easy?

There are places like Venezuela that pretty much give fuel away but any advanced nation pays through the nose. Most nations pay more for fuel than the United States.

Does it have anything to do with the fact that the United States forces other nations to purchase petrol in US Dollars do you think?

We are all getting ripped off and the ones ripping us off are crying about themselves.

This graph shows how easy Americans have it in relation to petrol price compared to the rest of the world.

flowingdata.com...

From the graph you can clearly see that Americans need to suck it up and walk it off. What the heck are they complaining about?
edit on 3-9-2012 by freemarketsocialist because: (no reason given)
edit on 3-9-2012 by freemarketsocialist because: (no reason given)

You're not thinking about the problem very clearly.

Why do Americans whine so much about the price petrol? Because outside of New York, Chicago and arguably San Francisco it's pretty much impossible to survive in America WITHOUT burning lots and lots of fuel.

You see...European cities are typically built on top of older cities that have often been around for hundreds or even thousands of years. The result is compact cities which tend to have narrow streets, not much in the way of parking lots, and consequently...EXCELLENT public transportation.

When the Europeans immigrated to the New World they found continents in North and South America in which 98% of the Native American populations had died out due to smallpox PRIOR to 1600...and then they proceeded to wage a three hundred year long campaign of organized genocide against that remaining 2%.

The result of this was lots and lots of "open" land in which it has historically pretty much always been cheaper to build outwards in a large sprawl than it was to build upwards. Hence, America put it's resources into building highways and parking lots to connect these vast distances between cities and suburbs.

How many people in Europe do you know that have to commute more 50 miles each way to go to work without there even being an OPTION for taking a bus or train? On average, I rack up 30K-40K miles PER YEAR of commuting miles to visit my clients (I'm in outside sales). You'd be driving through two or three different countries just to go to work everyday.

So...I hope that answers your question as to why Americans start freaking out at $4.00/gallon. It's all fun and games until you have to spend 20% of salary to simply transport your body to and from work everyday.

Now...the real question...is why are we such douchebags about building more high-speed rail systems? I don't have a good answer for on that other than to blame our Baby Boomer's. There is not much on planet Earth that makes less sense, behaves as irrationally, or responds with such knee-jerk reactionism as the American Baby Boomer. I have given up trying to figure them out and/or talk sense into them several years ago and am now just looking forward to them dying off.