Word: nationalism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...consumption of the size that would result from a 50? per gal. tax would pay important dividends both domestically and internationally. In the U.S. it would amount to an immediate and forceful warning to all Americans that energy conservation is now a national imperative. Overseas it would help loosen the world market for petroleum, make it at least somewhat more difficult for OPEC to raise prices, reduce prices on the spot market and send a signal to the U.S.'s increasingly skeptical allies that the nation is exercising leadership to curb energy use. Even with a 50? tax, Americans...
...gasoline tax would be about the nation's strongest weapon, short of rationing. Under a timid law passed in October, rationing cannot be imposed until either Congress approves it or the President is able to declare that the nation faces an immediate threat of a 20% oil-supply shortfall. By that time waiting lines at service stations probably would reach to the horizon. Even then, Congress could overrule the President and block rationing...
More immediately, large segments of the nation would suffer from the decline in driving and in demand for cars. The old manufacturing centers of the Midwest and East-steelmaking Pittsburgh and Youngstown, tiremaking Akron, glassmaking Toledo, many others-rise or decline along with the fortunes of autos. St. Louis, Kansas City, Wilmington, Del., and dozens more cities are automaking centers. In the Far West (where public transit is grossly inadequate) and the Plains states (where communities are separated by long distances), people must drive or suffer immobility. Of course, they can and must do more car pooling. That is difficult...
...were to increase sharply, growth in the economy as a whole would not necessarily slow, or unemployment rise, if the proceeds of the tax were recycled to consumers, as the various Administration proposals recommend. But the impact on consumer prices would be severe. A full 2.4 points of the nation's current 13.1% inflation rate is traceable directly to increases in gasoline prices this year. Tacking another 50? a gal. onto fuel costs by most estimates would add three or four points more to the consumer price index next year...
...long Americans have blithely assumed that rivers of cheap energy would flow through that economy like a magic elixir in endless abundance. But as 1979 has vividly demonstrated, the nation takes extreme risks if it does not curb its addiction to demon crude...