If there are two hot issues globally right now they’re the economy and the environment.
Not that the two are unconnected. Energy policy is increasingly moving to the centre of economic policy as concerns rise over climate change and resource depletion.
With just three months before Americans go to the polls, these issues are dominating debate above everything else.
The Democratic Party’s Barack Obama wants to eat the rich as his solution to higher food and energy costs. So the top tax rates will rise from 35% to 39% under his tax plan as taxes for most middle and low-income families will fall to help them meet their higher food and energy costs.
His Republican Party rival, John McCain, wants tax cuts across the board, but particularly for higher-income Americans, to get the economy going again.
Both plans have drawn criticism, even from non-partisan critics, as doing too little to tackle the country’s record fiscal deficit.
Obama further sees the need to put extra taxes on Big Fuel to help ease the burden of motorists. He wants an excess profits tax on Big Oil to finance a $1 000 a family energy rebate to help deal with high fuel costs.
“ExxonMobil makes in 30 seconds what the typical Ohio worker makes in a year,” Obama said, criticising a McCain plan to offer $4-billion in additional tax breaks to energy companies.
Obama has also unveiled an ambitious programme to green the US economy. The plan, which is both full of detail and has energy conservation as its cornerstone, even won the support of Sarah Palin, the Alaska governor and Republican who is seen as having a chance of being on the McCain ticket when his choice of vice-president is announced.
Obama’s greening plan includes measures such as getting Americans to pump their car tyres up to the correct pressure. Obama was at first derided about this by the McCain camp, but later McCain admitted, as the experts will tell you, that fuel consumption can be cut by 3% using this simple idea.
Some of the opinion polls have Obama and McCain neck and neck. Others have Obama ahead by a few percentage points.
On predictive market Intrade (www.intrade.com) you can buy Obama to win at 61c (if he wins you get $1). McCain to win is a much cheaper 37c, suggesting that the smart money believes he is far less likely to be the next incumbent in the White House.
I bemoaned the fact a few months back that there were no Zuma futures to be bought on the internet. A few days later Intrade mailed to say it had set up contracts for both Jacob Zuma and Helen Zille as the next president and invited suggestions for any other names who should be on the list.
There are bid and offer prices for Zuma but as yet no trades. While bid and ask prices for Obama and McCain trade within the range of a cent, buyers of Zuma futures are offering 40c, while sellers want 60c.
If you think that Zuma as prez is a done deal, then you would buy up all available contracts at 60c and get R1 back in April, making 40c for every 60c invested. I can’t think of another investment with such a good return.
But buyers are less sure. They are prepared to punt only 40c to get R1 back.
The United States election is just a few months off, but South Africa’s, in April, is also just around the corner.
The difference, though, couldn’t be more glaring. In the US there is cut and thrust. There is debate. There is no quarter asked or given.
Back home there is no sense of an imminent election.
The ANC political heavyweights are solely concerned with keeping their president out of jail and so all action this week was centred on Zuma’s latest in a string of court cases, this time in Pietermaritzburg.
If this was the US he would have been out there with a pressure gauge at fuel stations, measuring tyre pressures and encouraging motorists to blow up their tyres. His lieutenants, instead of spending their time rubbishing the judiciary and making inflammatory statements, could be, for instance, leading debates about whether there is a need for higher taxes on the rich given the dramatic recent rise in food and fuel prices.
But instead they were all in court. Again.
The winner-takes-all style of democracy we have here, proportional representation, means that most energy goes into wooing influential ANC members in the party structures to be best able to make sure that this or that “camp” rules the roost.
As for the voters, well, they hardly matter.