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Posts Tagged ‘gas prices’

Gas Tax Redux

Last week I posed a simple challenge: Try to find any coherent economist willing to support the gas tax holiday proposed by candidates McCain and Clinton. The challenge remains unanswered, but here’s some interesting commentary collected during the week: 1. George Stephanopoulos posed my challenge directly to Senator Clinton (video here), asking: “Can you name one economist — a credible . . .



Elections, Hot Air, and Gas

Election season is probably the best time for bad economic policies to garner support — and one of the roles of academic economists is to call the candidates out on terrible policy. From yesterday’s New York Times, we learn that: Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton lined up with Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, in endorsing a plan . . .



Will Drivers Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Bus?

The New York Sun reports that gas may hit $10 a gallon before too long, putting it in line with European prices. The ground is already shifting. Employers find that getting employees out of their cars and onto company-owned, Wi-Fi-enabled buses boosts productivity and morale. Fewer and fewer teenagers are getting driver’s licenses, and public transportation ridership is at its . . .



West Texas Oil Drilling Is Booming — No Surprise

We just returned from four days of hiking in Big Bend National Park, and today we drove 500 miles in Texas along I-10. A number of oil wells were pumping vigorously along the highway. When we took the same road 6 years ago, the wells were there, but they were not pumping. This is no surprise: in 2002 the price . . .



The Ethanol Mess

One of the perks of being an M.I.T. graduate is that I get an automatic subscription to the magazine Technology Review. I highly recommend it to anyone with a curiosity about science and technology. It is not technical or hard to understand (like, say, Scientific American). Rather, it is loaded with fascinating articles about cutting edge advances in technology, written . . .