Get over yourself, dude. Please do not try to argue that Saudi Arabia was some kind of desert utopia before they began extracting oil.
I'm confused. So everyone understands that the gasoline tax doesn't actually generate enough revenue to fund transportation infrastructure anymore. So where exactly are we going to get money for that. As fuel efficiency improves, you have less money for roads since its totally consumption based. I personally think a mileage tax is better than the current gasoline tax and we already do something similar to pure mileage taxes with the IFTA agreement for motor carriers. And spare the act about a tax hurting poor people when every Republican candidate is proposing a regressive flat tax and/or sales tax over a progressive income tax.
I had no idea so many conservatives here cared so much about poor people. Please apply this same mentality to your other economic policies.
US, Australia, and Canada have tremendous amounts of "natural resources" and produce the "natural resources". These three countries are some of the wealthiest countries in the world.
So you only care about yourself, not the working poor who have to drive to work every day to make ends meet.
We can just use the money to subsidize affordable central-city housing, no more driving. Win-win. #socialengineered
It won't. Obama would love to impose this by edict if he could, but he can't. This is just virtue signaling to keep himself in the news.
what have you done lately for the working poor who have to drive to work every day to make ends meet.
Very forward thinking, progressive idea, SamFisher. This idea has worked well in the affordable housing structures on the south side of Chicago and places like the Marcy Projects in Brooklyn.
China produces more than 50% of the world's coal. They produce over 4 million barrels of oil per day. They have, and they produce a tremendous amount of "natural resources". They represent 1/7 of the world's population. They have had some of the greatest economic growth in history over the past 20 years. Could you provide some data for your claims, or am I going to be the only one providing data?
http://www.nber.org/papers/w5398.pdf Have fun, let me know if you need a crash course in econometrics.
Jeffrey Sachs? LOL1 An 18 year review of economic growth by the same professor who went to Russia to teach them about "economics" and ended up helping to crash their economy in 1999, which gave rise to gangster capitalism that put Vladimir Putin in power? No thanks. I recommend you come back with something written by someone with more credibility. Besides, his research left out the economies of Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, etc, some of the largest "resource" exporters in the world! Exactly what you would expect from someone who got schooled this badly on national tv: <iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3oZtPK6hqLU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
LOL ad hominem won't save you from decades of economic research from different people. http://www.nber.org/papers/w15836 https://eiti.org/files/The Natural Resource Curse in Sub-Saharan Africa.pdf http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e283639a-3aac-11e5-bbd1-b37bc06f590c.html
That is just saying they are far too dependent on their resources for their economy. The CRB Index has only averaged like 2% growth (and is subject to massive amounts of volatility) over the past like 40 years so this makes sense that they would lag if they are heavily depending on commodities. It isn't saying that having an abundance of resources is bad. The management of the funds collected from the sale of the resources and organization of a coherent state is the issue. Just my take.
