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Originally Posted by offmycloud
It's sad. Now NH like Massachusetts is seeking goverments' greatest goal - socialism, the form of government which is a dramatic failure everywhere it is tried.
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The people had their opportunity to vote last year and put the Democrats in control of Concord for the first time in... 70+ years? How anyone can be shocked at the result of that decision and it's reward of new fees and higher taxes is beyond me. But class warfare, wealth envy and grand schemes to re-distribute said wealth is what we do best in this country today -- along with pointing fingers of blame at everyone else for what we did to ourselves.
Gas costs what it costs and our Constitution makes no guarantee that we should have cheap or affordable gas. We can blame "big oil" and their record profits and then try to tax the crap out of them for making money, but that's nuts. We can simply dismiss the stagnant growth in refining capacity over the past 30 years, the regulatory tangle of EPA and other federal hurdles that block additional capacity from being built and shrug off an increase in global demand for the same crude. We can ignore the fact that we've regulated ourselves into the need to refine more than 30 unique blends of regional fuels that result in supply disruptions as the change-overs take place. But the reality is we did this to ourselves and this is the free market at work. Folks don't like that answer, but I think we only need look as far as Iran this week: While sitting on top of some of the worlds richest petroleum reserves, the Iranians imposed gas rations this week in response to it's own lack of refining capacity and dependence on external sources for up to half of it's gasoline supply. When Iran doesn't have gas...
As power boaters, we're operating RECREATIONAL vehicles that consume somewhere between 1 and 4 gallons of gasoline or more per mile of travel. With those kind of numbers, boaters should be the LAST ones complaining about the price of gas. For me, $3.50 a gallon for 89 octane containing less than 10% ethanol, for a seasonal gas station, on the waterfront with it's additional marine environmental considerations -- It's still a pretty good deal.