Class Warfare
Growing up, I was thrust into a world that was very unfamiliar to me. I was the son of two working class parents, living from paycheque to paycheque, attending Lower Canada College…
Given that I was politically oriented from a very early age, I always found it was very interesting to live in one world during the day, and heading home to a different one at night. One way to really understand class is to experience two different ones on a daily basis like I did for 7 years.
Being (somewhat) educated, I am able to listen to politicians and find faults in their arguments pretty easily. I’ve gotten pretty good at tearing people down.
However, I know when an idea is going to be popular. My extreme distaste for populism stems from politicians taking advantage of a large group of people who simply don’t know better. I disliked John Edwards because I believed he was a person with a 400$ haircut trying to take advantage of average working class Americans. Some may call that snobbery. How do I know what is best for people? In our own way, we all judge others for political decisions they make because we feel we are more intelligent than they are. Where is the balance?
My father is a janitor at a shopping mall at the corner of Frontenac and Ontario streets in the Hochelaga district of Montreal. I spent many days there as a kid, even working there one summer as a stockboy as my classmates were in Europe or on a beach somewhere. Those who know Montreal well know the area. It is poor; filled with people who are the victims of bad decisions or have made bad decisions themselves.
The memory that stayed with me the most from that summer was on the first day of August, the manager of the store where I worked asked me to go deposit a cheque at the Caisse Populaire in the mall. As I strolled around the corner, I saw a line of at least 200 people waiting at the bank. I couldn’t believe my eyes. My dad sees me there shell-shocked and comes over to me laughing. “Tony, it is the first of the month, not everybody lives like your friends at school. Hurry up and go earn your money.”
Later that day, I was at the depanneur in the strip mall on my lunch break, buying my dad cigarettes (I was 14 lol). I had a conversation with the owner of the depanneur, who was grinning from ear to ear. He explained to me that the first of the month was like Christmas in the place. “Nothing beats being the guy selling the cigarettes next to a Caisse Pop when people get their welfare checks.” I think I am still somewhat traumatized by that lazy summer August day. I didn’t learn the value of a dollar that day; I earned the value of an earned dollar.
I wanted to take that story to remind people why nobody in Indiana or North Carolina is listening to economists in their ivory towers right now surrounding the gas tax holiday issue. Will giving Americans a break on the gas tax in the United States bring down the cost of oil? Of course it won’t. When we looked at policy to bring down the cost of gas, we found there was no short term solution, that 70$ for a barrel of oil would continue going up in the short term and that alternate sources of energy, including ethanol, which is causing a global food shortage, would bring down the cost of a barrel of crude oil.
Also, you can use coal to make oil at the cost of 55 dollars a barrel, at a huge detriment to the environment. If the US moved to do that immediately, the price of gasoline could fall almost a dollar a gallon by the end of the decade. Using coal to make oil would also be another short term solution, but long term, for the sake of the environment, we need to waste less energy, and produce more renewable energy. When oil was at 70$ a barrel this didn’t seem worth it. When oil is 115$ dollars a barrel, it may be time to consider it as a temporary option.
The only thing a government can directly control in the short-term is the gas tax, and in Canada’s case, the GST on the gas tax. Eliminating either is not a long-term solution. However, a holiday on the tax at the expense of the oil companies, who are taking in billions, is not impossible.
I know it sounds like Robin Hood taking from the rich and giving to the poor, but basically what Clinton is saying to the American people is: “Okay, I can give you a little break this summer and make the oil companies pay for gouging consumers. However, if we want this to stop, we have to get serious on alternate sources of fuel.” There has never been a better opportunity to get the American people onside with alternate sources of energy than now, as they are paying record prices for gas.
So to all those economists, yes it is only 30 dollars. However, those are 30 earned dollars to those people. So while economists drink a 7 dollar latte, a working family in Indiana can afford to buy that extra loaf of bread, or rent that movie to entertain the kids because they can’t afford to take them out. Never tell anybody what their dollar is worth to them.
That is the glaring mistake Obama and his Obamaniacs are making by calling this a scheme and not giving it serious thought. When people say things like “that is only 30$, pennies a day”, they sound elitist, because they are saying these people do not need the money, and that oil companies should just pocket the 8 billion dollars.
To be fair, Obama also said he would tax windfall profits and use the money to invest in renewable energy. Probably a wise thing to do in the long term. However, people are struggling now. They need relief now. The American spirit can only take these people so far. Telling them there is nothing we can do about this for the next 10-15 years is lying to their faces Barack, there is only things you do not want to do.
This is the very difficult lesson Hillary and Bill Clinton are teaching Obama as they barnstorm through small-town Indiana and North Carolina.
When Obama says these people do not need that money, he sounds like a guy who went to Lower Canada College, telling everybody that he knows better than them, that he knows what to do with their money. What working-class Americans are responding back is that after hearing Obama tell them that their earned money isn’t useful to them, his change is something they can do without…
Given that I was politically oriented from a very early age, I always found it was very interesting to live in one world during the day, and heading home to a different one at night. One way to really understand class is to experience two different ones on a daily basis like I did for 7 years.
Being (somewhat) educated, I am able to listen to politicians and find faults in their arguments pretty easily. I’ve gotten pretty good at tearing people down.
However, I know when an idea is going to be popular. My extreme distaste for populism stems from politicians taking advantage of a large group of people who simply don’t know better. I disliked John Edwards because I believed he was a person with a 400$ haircut trying to take advantage of average working class Americans. Some may call that snobbery. How do I know what is best for people? In our own way, we all judge others for political decisions they make because we feel we are more intelligent than they are. Where is the balance?
My father is a janitor at a shopping mall at the corner of Frontenac and Ontario streets in the Hochelaga district of Montreal. I spent many days there as a kid, even working there one summer as a stockboy as my classmates were in Europe or on a beach somewhere. Those who know Montreal well know the area. It is poor; filled with people who are the victims of bad decisions or have made bad decisions themselves.
The memory that stayed with me the most from that summer was on the first day of August, the manager of the store where I worked asked me to go deposit a cheque at the Caisse Populaire in the mall. As I strolled around the corner, I saw a line of at least 200 people waiting at the bank. I couldn’t believe my eyes. My dad sees me there shell-shocked and comes over to me laughing. “Tony, it is the first of the month, not everybody lives like your friends at school. Hurry up and go earn your money.”
Later that day, I was at the depanneur in the strip mall on my lunch break, buying my dad cigarettes (I was 14 lol). I had a conversation with the owner of the depanneur, who was grinning from ear to ear. He explained to me that the first of the month was like Christmas in the place. “Nothing beats being the guy selling the cigarettes next to a Caisse Pop when people get their welfare checks.” I think I am still somewhat traumatized by that lazy summer August day. I didn’t learn the value of a dollar that day; I earned the value of an earned dollar.
I wanted to take that story to remind people why nobody in Indiana or North Carolina is listening to economists in their ivory towers right now surrounding the gas tax holiday issue. Will giving Americans a break on the gas tax in the United States bring down the cost of oil? Of course it won’t. When we looked at policy to bring down the cost of gas, we found there was no short term solution, that 70$ for a barrel of oil would continue going up in the short term and that alternate sources of energy, including ethanol, which is causing a global food shortage, would bring down the cost of a barrel of crude oil.
Also, you can use coal to make oil at the cost of 55 dollars a barrel, at a huge detriment to the environment. If the US moved to do that immediately, the price of gasoline could fall almost a dollar a gallon by the end of the decade. Using coal to make oil would also be another short term solution, but long term, for the sake of the environment, we need to waste less energy, and produce more renewable energy. When oil was at 70$ a barrel this didn’t seem worth it. When oil is 115$ dollars a barrel, it may be time to consider it as a temporary option.
The only thing a government can directly control in the short-term is the gas tax, and in Canada’s case, the GST on the gas tax. Eliminating either is not a long-term solution. However, a holiday on the tax at the expense of the oil companies, who are taking in billions, is not impossible.
I know it sounds like Robin Hood taking from the rich and giving to the poor, but basically what Clinton is saying to the American people is: “Okay, I can give you a little break this summer and make the oil companies pay for gouging consumers. However, if we want this to stop, we have to get serious on alternate sources of fuel.” There has never been a better opportunity to get the American people onside with alternate sources of energy than now, as they are paying record prices for gas.
So to all those economists, yes it is only 30 dollars. However, those are 30 earned dollars to those people. So while economists drink a 7 dollar latte, a working family in Indiana can afford to buy that extra loaf of bread, or rent that movie to entertain the kids because they can’t afford to take them out. Never tell anybody what their dollar is worth to them.
That is the glaring mistake Obama and his Obamaniacs are making by calling this a scheme and not giving it serious thought. When people say things like “that is only 30$, pennies a day”, they sound elitist, because they are saying these people do not need the money, and that oil companies should just pocket the 8 billion dollars.
To be fair, Obama also said he would tax windfall profits and use the money to invest in renewable energy. Probably a wise thing to do in the long term. However, people are struggling now. They need relief now. The American spirit can only take these people so far. Telling them there is nothing we can do about this for the next 10-15 years is lying to their faces Barack, there is only things you do not want to do.
This is the very difficult lesson Hillary and Bill Clinton are teaching Obama as they barnstorm through small-town Indiana and North Carolina.
When Obama says these people do not need that money, he sounds like a guy who went to Lower Canada College, telling everybody that he knows better than them, that he knows what to do with their money. What working-class Americans are responding back is that after hearing Obama tell them that their earned money isn’t useful to them, his change is something they can do without…
par / by Anthony à / at 2:08 p.m.
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