Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Getting there is half the fun and most of the cost

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Mike Peterson Published: May 8, 2011 1 minute 2 comments

Piranha Club comes close enough on gas prices, given the necessary delay. Four dollars a gallon, five dollars a gallon, the point remains the same.

I went to a children's book fair yesterday. It was free to get in, but it wasn't local, so it cost me about fifty bucks to get there. I can write it off as business, but, as my then-wife used to point out, before you can write it off, you have to have something to write it off from. Even deductible expenditures have to fit in the budget somewhere, and, while "showing a loss" is great at tax time, it's not such a good thing at meal time.

Green people will tell you how good it is that gas prices are up, because they will make people consider public transit and more efficient cars. Well, yes, except that they're about half a century too late.

For the last year, I've been living in town, and I can walk to the post office, the bank and the grocery store. But in previous years, I've been several miles from those places and on rural routes where there isn't public transit. Could there be?

Sure, and then you'd only have to walk two or three miles to get to a juncture of country roads where a bus might logically pass by. Every 45 minutes or so. And that "or so" means that, if you're off by three minutes, you'll stand there in the rain, sleet, snow, blazing sun, for 42 minutes. Or so.

Back in about 1990, in the last days of the Soviet Union, some timber executives from there came over to Plattsburgh for a series of seminars on free market economies. I met them at a brief reception in the afternoon and then, that evening, was driving home in the dusk when I saw a bunch of people walking by the side of the road near the mall.

I pulled over and, sure enough, it was the Soviet timber executives, who had just been observing that they seemed to be the only pedestrians over the age of 11. But the fact is, the mall they had just been visiting and the supermarkets they had marvelled over were built for a society in which everybody has a car, and in which a household with more than one adult has more than one car.

Before WWII, and even into the 1950s, there were corner grocery stores and neighborhood pharmacies and small hardware stores and little department stores. They were mom-and-pop places, but they made a reasonable living serving neighborhoods. After all, they only had to support Mom and Pop, not a board of directors and millions of shareholders. And so they only needed patronage from about a three mile radius.

You can buy a fleet of buses and hire drivers and build bus shelters in all those remote corners of your community, but, if people can't tote home a week's worth of groceries at a crack, and if they have to take a bus into town to get a washer so they can fix the pipe so they can have running water, you haven't even addressed the problem, much less solved it.

I'm not saying the problem shouldn't be faced. But, meanwhile, we're in a society where it's hard enough to find a first job, never mind a second one. I heard some joker on the radio the other day talking about the benefits of eating local food, and someone asked about the additional cost. He answered that, if people would simply educate themselves about what goes into their bodies and the impact it all has on the environment, they wouldn't mind the extra cost.

Right. We'd just recoup that extra cost by vacationing in Belize this summer instead of going on safari in Africa, because the package is so much more affordable.

High gas prices have a theoretical benefit, but most of us aren't living theoretical lives on theoretical budgets, and, reality being what it is, the price of gasoline is right in there with the other "social safety net" issues that have to come up in any practical conversation on these topics.

The laugh in today's strip is that Ernie won't have to fill up his tank.

The joke is that some theorist thinks Ernie's going to solve the problem by going out and purchasing a $41,000 electric car, because he'll get a $7,500 (non-refundable) tax credit that will make it affordable.