Bollocks. You didn't mean it, but you're basically saying "fuck the poor to encourage conservation". The majority of people, at least in the United States, just don't have the means to buy a bigger car in the face of falling gas prices, let alone buy a smaller car if prices rise. Fancy Pants Whitebreadland is a small, shrinking world these days, and many of the homes of those left behind by that bubble are still siting vacant, waiting for new prosperity that so far hasn't come yet. If you're still living in that bubble, lucky you.
Greedy politicians and big conglomerate executives (no difference nowadays) are dying to screw the poor with higher prices and higher taxes, and lower wages from cheap immigrant labor. What great lengths have been taken to justify that end with seemingly agreeable ideas...
-Let's bring in millions of undocumented immigrants and make them legal. That group will join the poor, and the new poor population as a whole will pay more taxes than the smaller, current crop of poor people, even if they individually make less money. Win for gov't for the tax proceeds, win for big conglomerates for dirt cheap labor.
-Fossil fuel tax. Make it uneconomical for the poor to own a car. Force them to live in local ghettos rather than commute. Bonus since the rich don't have to deal with their traffic.
-Carbon tax. Make it uneconomical for the poor to use electricity and natural gas. Make their home environments too miserable for their children to succeed academically.
-ACA. Tax the poor if they can't afford health care.
-Conservation. Seize land in the name of nature, forcing land prices up, property tax higher, forcing poor and subsistence farmers to sell their land and enter the job market with no skills.
-Cigarette tax. The poor are much more likely to smoke than the rich. Poor tax.
I mean, none of those things really disturb me that much, since I'm not poor and I can handle price increases by leveraging a raise. I'd especially love not having to spend an hour commute with every idiot loser and his brother who thinks they just *have* to own a car and drive it every morning. BUT...once the majority of the country is good and screwed, and there is no hope to be had, and no more can be squeezed out of the poor...who or what is next? Just think about that for a minute.