Old 01-17-08, 08:48 PM
  #25  
JeffS
not a role model
 
JeffS's Avatar
 
Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: Portland, OR
Posts: 4,659
Mentioned: 0 Post(s)
Tagged: 0 Thread(s)
Quoted: 1 Post(s)
Likes: 0
Liked 1 Time in 1 Post
I'd love to see fewer cars, but if gas were to go to $20 tomorrow the entire economy would crash.

I consider the root of the problem that our government has based our economy on the housing market to a large extent. We have done everything we can to encourage home ownership, then designed/zoned cities such that people are living further and further away from a city center.

If gas prices continue to rise you eventually reach a tipping point when people start trying to sell their suburban homes. If this happens to quickly - as in a drastic price increase on gas - the value of homes starts to drop, new construction stops, jobs start to go away, people start to become unemployed in houses that they cannot sell for enough money to pay off their loans.

The fallout would make the subprime fiasco seem pleasant.
JeffS is offline