No, honestly, I think that the people I was arguing with are apparently so unfamiliar with the policies I was talking about that it is not worth the time and effort needed to explain how Obama’s policies impact energy prices and/or rural or suburban people.

In other words, his criticism is devoid of substance….yet I suspect he probably expects to be treated as though he’s full of substance. I’m perfectly happy to treat him as if he is full of a particular substance…..but I’ll leave it to everyone else to guess what that substance is.

In the context of this post, it was “Presdient Obama’s visible disbelief during a town hall meeting last Wednesday in Pennsylvania, when two audience members told him of their large families–one with seven children, the other with ten. The remarks came as Obama criticized owners of large SUVs and vans, implying they had only themselves to blame for high fuel costs.”

Though honestly, I rather like Obama going on about Pennsylvania’s “bitter clingers” – this time whining about gas costs. As I said before: he looks good in Jimmy Carter’s sweater

/snark

I have no idea what it is about Obama’s energy policies that you seem to object to. It is not as if he can raise and lower the price of oil or gas by fiat. He gave a lengthy explanation of what could and could not be done about the price of oil. What is it you find fault with?

But the very large family is not the norm, it’s not even a normal adnormal. As was pointed out above, only 0.4% of women 40-44 had 7 or more kids (and of course some of them no doubt had kids widely spaced apart rather than all at once). In other words, there are probably more gay people than people raising 10 kids and as I pointed out while it doesn’t make raising so many kids easy, there’s some pretty serious tax subsidies to it.

But almost all poor families aren’t raising ten kids, they are working hard to deal with just one, two or three and for them most SUVs are not about helping families with even more kids than they have to deal with, most SUV’s are about people with the same or fewer kids raising the price of gas for everyone else. For the better off this doesn’t matter. I’ll drive about as much at $4.00 a gallon as I do at $3.00. For the poor this matters a great deal.

In terms of ‘forced urbanization’, there’s no there there. Obama put billions into highways which helps rural and suburban areas more than urban ones. The stimulus package lowered payroll taxes which goes further in rural areas where the cost of living is lower. Even the Cash for Clunkers program tends to benefit more the non-urbanite. Poor people who live outside of cities tend to have low end used cars. Poor people in urban areas often can get by without a car. C4C gave no one a bonus for buying a bus or subway pass. In the meanwhile it’s the Republicans who keep pushing for cuts in the estate tax and upper income brackets which overwhelmingly benefits the urban or near urban rich…..talk of ‘family farms’ and such aside.

This is all pretty remarkable when you consider the fact that many rural areas are almost solidly red no matter what Obama does so politically there’s no particular reason for him not to be fully anti-rural and pro-urban. Instead all you have to cling to is seeking out the most minor of slights (ohhh he must hate huge families…..as if The Walton’s is an accurate illustration of the typical rural family today)

How many billions of dollars in the stimulus package when to highways versus public transportation?

In all probability, his goals are probably environmental. Of course, environmentalism amounts to a redistribution of wealth, from the poor (who lose access to jobs and resources) to the wealthy (who gain pretty landscapes and smug self-satisfaction).

But, yes, I am not the first person to notice that he supports policies that punish suburban and rural people and thus “encourage” urbanization.

“I think people who have large families shouldn’t have to pay any taxes at all. President Obama should have said “thank you for your service to our country,” to those families.”

Well actually they probably pay little or any taxes unless they are very high income. Ten kids is quite a few deductions.

As for the old harping on the ‘punishment’ line purposefully taken out of context by pro-lifers:

Look it’s pro-lifers themselves who use the punishment line…… More than a few times we hear pro-lifer endorsed politicians declare that they favor making abortion illegal ‘except for rape and incest’. Well why the ‘except’? The subtext is more than clear, “that’s what you get for having sex” is what is being said and the exception for rape victims is because they were forced against their will. For a generation now the abortion debate has mired itself in tiresome games of linguistic ‘gottcha’. You don’t have to ‘hate babies’ to see that in many circumstances having a baby is not a good idea, it is in fact a very bad idea for both mother and child. That doesn’t mean you have to agree that abortion is a legitimate answer but pretending pregnancy anywhere and everywhere is always a great thing is just being stupid. The right has really gone way down hill since the days of even Dan Quayle.

In terms of large families:

Err ten kids is a lot. It’s a lot today, it was a lot in 1950 (around when Groucho Marx said to a guest on his show who had something like ten kids “I like cigars too but I take it out of my mouth once in a while!”) it’s even a lot in developing countries where large families are the norm. A bit of good natured ribbing is not hostile or sinister unless you insist on approaching obama from the POV that he’s some type of evil one.

In terms of SUV’s, well look vehicles that burn more gas do increase the cost of gas. Now when you’re moving a lot of people around, the equation changes because the gas burned per person goes down. It’s a lot more efficient to pack ten people into one big vehicle to drive them somewhere than it is to use three or four smaller vehicles. Trains and busses work on this principle.

Very few gas guzzlers, though, are due to ‘large families’. They are small families or even individuals who are engaging in what is probably gratuitious personal consumption…i.e. gluttony. On the contrary, most SUV owners are no friends to the family with ten children, all they are doing is making it that much harder for that large family to make ends meet. Yet because your partisanship blinds you, you make that undebatable truth into a convoluted plea for Obama to….what get people to have lots of abortions so there’s plenty of gas for him to enjoy driving big SUV’s by himself? Yea ok….

Are you saying Obama is somehow deliberately raising oil prices to force the urbanization of America? If “Obama has made no secret of his desire to see America urbanized,” could you point to something he has said along these lines?

You say: ” . . . it’s plain that America will not be urbanized voluntarily”

The shift from rural to urban in the United States has been taking place since 1790!