Engineer – Poet — As a fellow engineer, I would think you would be smarter than your post. At least you don’t claim any expertise in economics, which is evident in your post. Your two most glaring mistakes 1) you try to combine statistics from the ’70s to today to somehow draw the conclusion somehow that lowering domestic supplies actually increases domestic consumption is ludicrous. There is no connection – the population, economic output etc, are all much larger today than they were in the ’70s and lack of domestic supplies and lack of allowing ourselves to tap supplies that we know about (offshore and ANWR) has helped push up the amount of imports we need. Which leads to the second that you and the original author totally ignore, but is a huge factor – energy consumption is pretty much inelastic. So, the tax on gasoline does not have the wedge effect that most taxes have.
