this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2024
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United States | News & Politics
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gas is a commodity, it's price is based on opec oil production, whether we get oil from them or not, along with global demand, the seasons and severity of winters around the world, political bullshit on the other side of the world, and corporate greed.
if you want to lay blame on high prices in the u.s., blame yourselves first for your addiction to large, gas-guzzling vehicles (among other things)... then blame the oil companies, who produce more now than ever before and choose to export at higher prices than they can sell domestically (the u.s. actually exports more than we import).
egg prices have been affected by infected farms and loss of production, and compounded by corporate greed eyeballing opportunities to artificially inflate, and hold high, prices; and they'd rather write-off a culling than spend a dime on preventive measures such as lower density farms or vaccinations (you know how well that would play out with our far-right dominated media these days).
neither can really be controlled by congress or the president. neither is the democrat's fault. neither is biden or harris' fault.
nah blame the lobbying and abuse of regulations that maintains the status quo of car-reliant infrastructure
if you didn't demand the giant trucks and weren't willing to pay giant premium prices for them; manufacturers wouldn't have the profit-driven motives to make them, focus almost exclusively on them, and cut production and selection of smaller and more affordable vehicles to 'make room' for them in the market.
There are legit regulatory issues that strongly incentivize manufactures to sell giant vehicles. Fuel efficiency standards for larger vehicles are a lot easier to meet. A lot of the demand for larger vehicles is driven by advertising.
Of course people could stop letting corporations drag them around by the nose, but it seems like most of the public still likes it that way.
Just to back you up, the regulations you are primarily speaking to are the CAFE standards. While the intent of CAFE standards is to reduce overall emissions and improve energy efficiency, the footprint-based model has led to a proliferation of less efficient, heavier vehicles that contribute to climate change and air pollution.
This was predicted back in 2011, before the standards were even active and it kind of played out exactly as they guessed.
I had this exact conversation several times with Americans while travelling for work in the USA.
Oil prices are up around the world and USA gas prices are actually really cheap compared to everywhere else.
In fact everything is pretty cheap compared to Europe and Australia.
But all they do is whinge and moan and blame Biden.
They have no friggen idea there's a whole wide world out there.
To be fair, you are probably not taking into account all the things Americans have to spend money on that are government services elsewhere. Healthcare alone takes a large chunk of American income. By the time people are spending money on groceries, there is often little or no money left.
I take your point but this was not the case for these people I was talking to. I pay their salaries and health insurance and they still take home 6 figures a year after all deductions.
Then they sit there complaining about gas prices and how Biden is running their lives when it's a worldwide thing and they have it better than 99% of the rest of humanity. Biden can't do shit about world wide issues.
The other day a guy i met from the D.C. area told me that low quality coffee costs 20$ a bag. Fucking pregrinded coffee for the filter machine. You can get the luxury beans for that money in Europe.
I don’t generally buy that but Amazon lists coffee at half that price
That's also completely untrue lol that guy is either lying or buying a huge bag of the expensive shit
Maybe at a more expensive convenience store, or he's like many idiots that shop somewhere like Whole Foods and because they're used to seeing some $70/bag organic free-range non-GMO gluten-free coffee grown in the Himalayas by a small sect of previously uncontacted monks, the "cheap stuff" is the $20 bag of stuff that's similarly overpriced.
The most I've ever paid for coffee in the US was $20/lb at a local artisan roaster, where they're blended and roasted right in the store. Usually my normal coffee is about $3-5/lb
The guy is from an immigrant family, and his parents until recently worked minimum wage. It is just that the cost of living in Washington D.C. got this outrageous.
Then sadly, knowing how a lot of my friends shopped when they were broke, I bet that it is something like a convenience store. Not saying that DC isn't expensive, I was literally just there visiting a friend who lives there, but I also live in an area with a CoL well above the national average and coffee still isn't $20 for cheap pre-ground stuff
Doesn't matter. You're right, but being right doesn't win elections.
The GOP claims they can fix it and that's all people hear and care about.
It's fucked up and sad, but true.
False. just straight up false. you literally straight up mentioned things to address some of the problems in your post. But besides that congress absolutely can pass laws that penalize companies for profiteering and then enforce them.
Pass a law making CEO/board members personally liable w/ jail time for a company's profiteering on food prices and watch what happens at even the wiff of a federal investigation.
Now tell me how many democrats supported bernie's windfall bill?
How exactly do you make raising profit margins illegal? You can do it for natural disasters and such, but companies raising prices when the market allows is just what all companies do all the time.
The government is capable of addressing these issues, but not by making profiteering illegal. They need to break up monopolies, vertical integration, and certain trade associations. They also need to address short term performance pay for CEOs. Any performance pay should be tied to company performance over at least the next ten years, not this quarter.
Americans aren't educated enough to know the difference, so without more clever messaging, all these facts are written off as "educated people trying to show they are more superior than us".
Politics is a show of messagimg and failed promises and Dem's consultants and marketeers failed miserably at this.