Number One issue facing the US today

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According to a recent Gallup Poll, the #1 concern facing Americans today is gas prices. If you're American, do you agree with the majority? Additionally, if you are not from the US, what do you think the #1 priority facing your particular country is?

people are morons and pay attention to the symptoms more than the problems. they complain about illegal immigration here but they don't look at why mexico is so screwed over and why people are so desperate to leave.

people look at gas prices but they don't look at what's going on in the world, what options are available and generally don't think beyond the pump.


people are basic, stupid animals for the most part.

the biggest problem facing my country (canada) right now would probably be the US economy. most of our exports go to the US, when they can't afford as many commodities, we export less. we have a large automotive manufacturing industry and the difficulties that some of the automotive companies have had have cost us some jobs recently. gas prices are an issue as well, driving up the cost of everything, but i don't think that has the potential to cause us as many problems as the weakening american economy.

Healthcare coverage is a huge problem here. That's a tie with gas/oil prices and our various militaristic enterprises.

Apathy and/or ignorance of the effects of proposed policy.

I'm Canadian, and I actually feel vaguely puzzled about all the fuss in the US over gas prices. Most of the rest of the world has been paying more for gas for decades; the US was, and still is really, keeping gas prices artificially low. Europe and to some extent Canada adapted to higher gas prices awhile ago; both tend to have smaller, fuel-efficient cars.

I find it fairly short-sighted to try to find ways to lower gas prices; at this point, it makes way more sense to adopt policies so people use less of it. It's not like the technology doesn't exist - as I said, Europe in particular has had to deal with higher prices for some time, and the market has responded by creating more fuel efficient cars.

Anyways, I think the most pressing issue for Canadians is the proposed introduction of a carbon tax. I think this is a great idea, and plan to vote for the Liberals for having the balls to bring it up.

i love the conservative anti-carbon tax commercials on the radio, they're soooooo terrible. i don't really know much about the issue so i can't comment for or against it, but the commercials are hilarious.

Which brings me to the #1 issue plaguing the US today: It is a corporatist state, under the guise of a democracy. So long as big [insert name here] controls some aspect of the economy, they're not going to give it up.

As an example: Oil companies in other countries (BP is the first that comes to mind) are doing what they can to research other means (mostly renewable means) of acquiring and storing energy, as they know that in the long run, selling oil will eventually fail (since there is only so much oil on the planet). However, American oil companies keep doing what they can to sell oil and not spend money on r&d for alternative fuels, since god forbid that temporarily lowers their stock.

When corporations have more rights than people, you know something is really screwy with the system. The original concept of a corporation was to create an entity that wasn't explicitly tied to one person. If the corporation did something that could result in a lawsuit and/or settlement, the people involved were only financially liable to the extent that they were invested. Nowadays, you have corporate forces stomping on individual rights (which should be superior to those of a corporation, but unfortunately arent).

Last edited by ToadOfSteel on 13 Aug 2008, 10:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.

@Speckles:
"Artifiically low"...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but is isn't true that much of the price is due to vastly higher gas taxes in those areas?

My personal #1 concern is the Federal Reserve.

Send every illegal back with an M-16 and a few bandoliers of ammo; tell him to fix his government.

I seriously hope you were being sarcastic. If so, then I offer you my lulz...

The environment is the biggest issue. All other issues must be secondary if our environment is jeopardized. Personally, I find it a great moral compulsion to care for our planet, but even if you are a selfish pig not caring for our planet, if our planet has trouble, we have trouble, as we depend on it for life.

The main issue to me even though i'm not American is the envirementalism trend.
Everything seems to focus on it these days as if the world is coming to an end and we only have a few more years to stop it.
While in reality the temperature has never had the same average for years on end.
Ice ages and ages of warming up have been happening throughout the milions of years of history.
For instance the middle ages were far warmer than it is now.
Does that mean the world was coming to an end during the middle ages ?!

It seems to me the only reason the goverment propoganda machine proclaims that the world is warming is to invent new taxes.
For instance in Europe some big companys have to pay milions in emission rights.
But why ? i mean it's not like we can do without what they are doing.
Also a huge array of new taxes on existing products in the name of the envirement have been invented in the past 10 years.
The funny thing is that that money is reserved to be spend on non envirement helping things.

I seriously wouldn't worry about the envirement and the planet ending and stuff.
If a new iceage is coming it won't be for another few thousend years.

You can probably expect Alberta to opt out on it if it happens. Last time(the NEP) was disaster for Alberta, and this time Alberta is holding the countries economy up. To impose a carbon tax would reduce us to what the Ontario manufacturing is suffering.

That would be a disaster for all of Canada.

Our ability to weather the US recession is vital: When(and if) the US crawls out of that, Canada will emerge far stronger or weaker, depending on if we allow ourselves to suffer that recession too. If we can dodge that recession until the wide spread emergence of cleaner manufacturing, we will no longer have to be pushed around by American trade policy. We will call the shots.

An early example of America using economic/military clout to suppress emergent technology in Canada was the Avro Arrow. Had they not demanded(and we capitulated) that the Arrow be scrapped, Canada would have been the leading aerospace developer in the world. Instead, the Arrow was scrapped and our brain power migrated to Lockhead and Nasa.