Among the rest of today’s bad news is this article from the Dallas Morning News. With the price of gas less than half of what it was last year, people are abandoning small cars and buying trucks again. Idiots.
In the interest of full disclosure, I drove trucks (albeit small trucks) for quite a few years. They’re handy to have, particularly if you have a spouse/partner with a car for the times you need to haul people or groceries instead of furniture or lumber. And if you work in construction or farming, you pretty much have to have one. I have no arguments with those folks.
But I see far too many pickup trucks and large SUVs in the office parking garage, at the grocery stores, and going down Central Expressway with one occupant – they’re being used as oversized commuter vehicles.
1) Do these people really think that gas is going to be $1.71 a gallon for the five or six years they’ll be paying on their 12 MPG monster? As soon as the economy comes back (and it will come back, maybe not this year, but long before these loans will be paid off) gas will start going up again.
2) Have they forgotten where we get too much of our oil, and what those people do with the money we send them?
3) Have they forgotten what burning fossil fuels is doing to the environment? And do they think the oil is going to last forever?
The answer to #1 is that they haven’t even thought about it and the answer to #2 and #3 is no, they haven’t forgotten, because they never knew in the first place.
When I was a kid, I took some harassment because I tried to think farther out than tonight’s party. I figured that once people grew up, they’d see their lives would be so much easier if they planned ahead a bit. I was wrong. Admittedly, I sometimes take things too far in the other direction, but as a nation we are continuing to make things worse for ourselves and our descendants because we refuse to say no to anything we want.
Idiots.
The good news is that if you’re in the market for a car (and you’ve got the money for one – not a given these days), you can get a great deal on a Prius, Civic, Corolla, or some other very nice but very practical cars.
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