What Would Robin Do?
FROM TODAY'S WALL STREET JOURNAL EUROPE
Milan
Italy's "Robin Hood Tax" -- a windfall profits tax on energy companies -- has kicked off a wave of oil populism in Europe.
Though the Italian Parliament approved the new tax only on Tuesday, the trend began spreading across Europe shortly after the Berlusconi government launched the measure back in June. Portugal quickly followed Italy's lead with an extraordinary tax on oil companies' reserves. The U.K. is also mulling ways to address oil prices and oil companies' alleged windfalls. The European commissioner for taxation, László Kovács, has indicated support for such measures. France had a heated debate on the issue, which ended with a "spontaneous" gift of over €100 million from the national champion Total to the government. Italy's Eni also "donated" €200 million to the government in Rome. Evidently, both Paris and Rome made it clear that these companies could either give the money freely, or be forced to pay it.
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| Chad Crowe |
In any case, these policies are nothing more than charades, albeit dangerous ones. The continental European countries that are considering these measures aren't large hydrocarbon producers and have little say in setting oil prices, so the chief effect of these taxes is allowing politicians to claim they've "done something." Still, the other message they send to the public -- that government somehow knows the "right price" for a good and, what's more, can reach this price level through taxation -- is a falsehood that will only skew business-investment decisions as well as future policy debates. This is true not only for the oil sector but for the economy in general, as companies understand that there is little certainty about the rules in these countries.
The underlying assumption for these measures is that oil companies are making huge profits thanks to soaring oil prices, while consumers are paying ever more for gas. Hence, the government has a right to intervene in the name of fairness.
The first problem with this premise is that high oil prices are not specific to Europe, but rather a global fact. A country like Italy imports 90% of the oil and 84% of the natural gas it consumes, and since Rome cannot tax Libyan and Russian producers its fiscal policies will have a negligible effect on the price Italians pay for gasoline, apart from possibly increasing prices.
In fact, Italian oil companies' profits have been declining, not rising. According to the Unione Petrolifera (the national association of oil companies), net profits for oil companies in Italy actually decreased by 55% from 2005 to 2007. Italy's economy minister, Giulio Tremonti, apparently didn't bother to look up the facts before announcing in June that "extraordinary profits require a corresponding taxation."
The one piece of good news from the Italian oil industry is that investments increased by 60% from 2005 to 2007, as companies worked to meet stricter environmental measures and upgrade infrastructure such as refineries and distribution and retail networks. Slapping a windfall profits tax on these firms now would only reverse this promising trend.
In fact, the Italian version of Robin Hood is even worse since the extra tax is not a one-off but includes a structural increase in the corporate tax rate of 5.5 percentage points for energy companies. This includes electricity utilities and traders, who don't necessarily gain from high oil prices.
Businesses invest under the assumption that fiscal pressure as well as other regulations will remain consistent. If you raise taxes -- and especially if you do so starting from the current year -- you might achieve higher tax revenue this year. But you will also discourage investments, and hence economic growth and tax revenue, in the future. In a time of global crisis, adopting antigrowth measures is not the smartest move.
But let's pretend for a moment that the industry was piling up big profits, and that fiscal policies wouldn't affect its investment plans. Regardless of what one considers to be a "normal" or "acceptable" return on invested capital, past evidence suggests that windfall profits taxes usually don't work as a means of reducing consumer prices for a couple of reasons.
First, taxes on industry are just additional costs that firms very often pass along to their customers. Even if some of that revenue is given to taxpayers, they're just getting back money that they paid to the companies, and thus the government in the first place. Minus, of course, the government's cost of running this shell game.
Second, if you tax something, all else being equal you will get less of it. And reducing supply is a terrible way to lower prices.
In the case of oil, taxes lead to less domestic production and more imports. For example, a 1990 Congressional Research Service study showed that the U.S. windfall profits tax in the 1980s resulted in a 3%-6% decrease in domestic production and an increase in imports of 8%-16%.
There is also populism on the demand side. Several countries -- including France, which currently holds the EU's rotating presidency, and Italy -- have passed or are considering tax holidays to reduce gas prices. These measures amount to momentary tax reductions for either all consumers or specific groups such as fishermen or truck drivers.
While there actually is in Europe a serious problem of excess taxes on energy, this is probably not the right moment to address it -- and definitely not with temporary measures. You can either cut taxes or keep them high, but you should not let them vary according to day-to-day concerns.
Higher prices convey a message about growing scarcity: If this message is hidden by fiscal changes, people will not change their behavior -- as they are actually doing right now -- and the ratio between oil demand and supply will stay tight. The tax holiday's most questionable feature is that it implies that the government knows of a "right price" that exists for gas separate from the market price -- and that such price can be achieved by political decisions. The whole history of central planning demonstrates that this isn't true.
"Robin Hood" taxes are a very bad idea because they create new problems without solving the existing ones. What Europe needs is not more government interventionism, but more dynamic markets, lower taxes and more economic freedom. Pursuing higher fiscal revenues, while advertising new taxes as if they were in the interest of the poor, is not the answer that Robin Hood would give.
Mr. Stagnaro is research and studies director of Instituto Bruno Leoni.
My Bet With Francis Fukuyama
No matter what happens in November, the war in Iraq will not be brought to an end by either Barack Obama or John McCain. The war in Iraq is over. We've won.
Exhibit A for my claim: Francis Fukuyama has agreed to write me a check for $100.
In March 2006, I wrote a blistering review of "America at the Crossroads," Mr. Fukuyama's sensational repudiation both of the war in Iraq as well as the neoconservative movement of which he was once a leading light.
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FROM THE ARCHIVES
The book was widely praised. I called its arguments weak, its policy prescriptions weaker, and its manner disingenuous, since Mr. Fukuyama -- an early advocate of regime change in Iraq who claimed to have changed his mind several months before the war began -- had given no unequivocal indication of his opposition when his views might have made a real difference.
There followed between us an exchange of emails, in which Mr. Fukuyama pointed to various pieces he had published prior to the war indicating some concerns about how the U.S. would go in, and some foreboding about what might follow. He also mentioned a $100 bet he had made in May 2003 with a friend -- a supporter of the war -- that Iraq would be a mess five years after the invasion, the definition of a mess being "you'd know one if you saw it." We agreed to make the same bet.
I nearly forgot about the bet until last Friday, when the Washington Post reported U.S. combat fatalities in Iraq for the month of July. The total came to five. Six other soldiers were killed in noncombat situations.
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RSS FEEDSThe rate of combat fatalities may again inch higher. For all the progress made in the last year, Iraq remains a dangerous (if no longer terrifying) place. But to speak of Iraq as a "war" no longer accurately characterizes the nature of the situation: For purposes of comparison, U.S. combat deaths in Vietnam in 1971, when America's involvement was winding down and U.S. troop levels stood roughly where they are today in Iraq, averaged 115 a month.
Speaking of "war" also confuses our understanding of what the U.S. should do next. Put simply, and pace Barack Obama, "getting out of Iraq" and "ending the war" are no longer synonymous.
With this in mind, I wrote Mr. Fukuyama to suggest that he owed me $100. He conceded, albeit strictly on "the narrow terms" of the bet itself.
Mr. Fukuyama insists, however, that he has been vindicated on the broader issue: "We've spent a trillion or so dollars, 30,000 dead or wounded, a large loss in international influence and prestige, all for the sake of disarming a country with no WMDs."
He adds that "my concern right from the beginning was that the war wouldn't be worth the effort it would require, and that the American people don't have a good record in supporting long, costly struggles in developing countries." And he asks for "public recognition" that he was no latecomer to opposing the war.
I'll grant that Mr. Fukuyama had decided the war was a mistake -- if only in a whisper -- before it was begun. Where does that leave us now? Perhaps it's worth considering what we have gained now that Iraq looks like a winner.
Here's a partial list: Saddam is dead. Had he remained in power, we would likely still believe he had WMD. He would have been sitting on an oil bonanza priced at $140 a barrel. He would almost certainly have broken free from an already crumbling sanctions regime. The U.S. would be faced with not one, but two, major adversaries in the Persian Gulf. Iraqis would be living under a regime that, in an average year, was at least as murderous as the sectarian violence that followed its collapse. And the U.S. would have seemed powerless to shape events.
Instead, we now have a government that does not threaten its neighbors, does not sponsor terrorism, and is unlikely to again seek WMD. We have a democratic government, a first for the Arab world, and one that is increasingly capable of defending its people and asserting its interests.
We have a defeat for al Qaeda. Critics carp that had there been no invasion, there never would have been al Qaeda in Iraq. Maybe. As it is, thousands of jihadists are dead, al Qaeda has been defeated on its self-declared "central battlefield," and the movement is largely discredited on the Arab street and even within Islamist circles.
We also have -- if still only prospectively -- an Arab bulwark against Iran's encroachments in the region. But that depends on whether we simply withdraw from Iraq, or join it in a lasting security partnership.
None of these are achievements to sneer at, all the more so because they were won through so much sacrifice. Mr. Fukuyama has now granted the "narrow" point of our bet in the form of a personal check. Here's betting him $100 back that he will come around to conceding the broader case for the war in Iraq -- shall we say, on the 10th anniversary of its liberation?
We Need a New Think Tank
For the War on Terror
Shortly after 9/11, in an interview for a book I was writing on how to handle terrorism as a strategic threat, the pre-eminent nuclear strategist Thomas C. Schelling remarked: "What the government really ought to do is reverse-engineer the Rand Corporation of the fifties and sixties."
During that crucial epoch, Rand helped draw a sharp distinction between first-strike and second-strike nuclear deterrence, and the dangerously offense-oriented "brinkmanship" of the 1950s gave way to the more stable defensive posture of "mutual assured destruction."
Back then, Rand was situated exclusively in Santa Monica, Calif., far away from the churn of day-to-day government policy implementation. It had uniquely broad research and budgeting standards that freed analysts to think outside the box about strategic problems. At the same time, Rand's official status as a federally funded research and development center afforded its employees high-level security clearances and access to classified information and government officials.
Today, Rand's closeness to the Pentagon and other federal agencies has narrowed its priorities. A new, government-linked think tank with an expansive mandate may be the best mechanism for incubating strategies to fight terror.
The Pentagon is finally moving in that direction with its five-year, $50 million Minerva Consortia. The initiative aims to recruit a broad spectrum of social scientists -- psychologists, demographers, economists, sociologists, historians, anthropologists and security studies experts -- to help figure out how to marginalize al Qaeda and its ilk. Grant proposals will be peer-reviewed to ensure high-caliber work. Under Minerva, Defense Department-sponsored research is to be open and unclassified, so that those funded can exercise their academic freedom without being afraid of being co-opted into performing ethically dicey secret work.
In the late 1950s, Mr. Schelling took time off from teaching economics at Yale to work at Rand on the problem of stabilizing nuclear deterrence. While the general theory of deterrence was elegantly simple and required few secrets to understand, honing its specific applications demanded classified technical details about nuclear explosives, bomber and missile logistics, information and launch procedures, and worst- and best-case scenarios, among other things.
Mr. Schelling had ready access to such information at Rand, and it deepened his understanding of the strategic environment. For that reason, he was able to forge groundbreaking innovations in game theory that illuminated the value of communications and even negotiations in ensuring mutual deterrence -- particularly through the arms- control process -- and staving off Armageddon.
Much of the work funded by Minerva will be open source, and could well involve access to people -- for instance, imprisoned terrorists -- who might be more inclined to speak more candidly with think-tankers than government interrogators. But for such work to have maximum worth, it will often need to be validated by and integrated with classified intelligence. If primary researchers are not privy to such information, that task will go to government analysts. From the standpoint of ensuring the academic integrity of the research, it is better for the job to remain in the hands of scholars who embrace classified access as a means of retaining control over its quality.
During the Cold War, many if not most scholars opposed U.S. foreign and security policy, and some regarded Mr. Schelling as tainted for helping to devise the "deadly logic" of nuclear deterrence. Yet at the end of the day, his access to classified information did not compromise his integrity, and the extraordinarily fertile intellectual environment at Rand early in the Cold War proved central to his success.
In 2005, Mr. Schelling finally received the Nobel Prize in economics for, in the Nobel Committee's words, "having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis" albeit "against the backdrop of the nuclear arms race in the late 1950s." That's a strong recommendation for following his advice today.
Mr. Stevenson is a professor of strategic studies at the U.S. Naval War College. His "Thinking Beyond the Unthinkable: Harnessing Doom from the Cold War to the Age of Terror," will be published this month by Viking.
Faith-Based Initiative
"Bill Clinton made a plea [Tuesday] for a new emphasis on monogamy as a key element in the battle against Aids," London's Independent reports. Seriously:
The former US president . . . said it was very important to change people's attitudes to sex.
In an interview with the BBC recorded in Africa, Mr Clinton said that increasing support for monogamy was not just a problem for the continent worst hit by Aids but for the world.
"To pretend we can ever get hold of this without dealing with that--the idea of unprotected sexual relations with unlimited numbers of partners--I think would be naïve," he said.
Wait, wait, stop laughing! There is a serious point here. It's easy to dismiss Clinton as a hypocrite, but his failure to practice what he preaches has no bearing on the hygienic merits of his statement. Even if he had put his argument in moral terms, it would be equally valid regardless of his own behavior.
That said, Clinton's hypocrisy does make him a problematic advocate for monogamy, simply because it makes him so hard to take seriously. Even the Independent, a left-wing paper doubtless sympathetic to the ex-president, can't resist a little dig to the effect that Clinton is "not noted for his ability to keep his own marriage vows." Maybe AIDS advocates should find a better spokesman for monogamy.
But who? John Edwards is out for obvious reasons. John Kerry? Not with that "chance encounter on a dock." Barack Obama is busy for the next three or 51 or 99 months. But wait. What about Al Gore? By all accounts, he and wife Tipper have a true and enduring love.
Ah, but Gore is busy too, "saving" the "planet" from "global" "warming." Pity. But wait. This gives us an idea. When it comes to global warmism, Gore has the same problem Clinton has vis-à-vis sex--to wit, an insatiable appetite, for carbon in the erstwhile veep's case. Gore has solved this problem by buying "emissions credits." Essentially, that means he pays someone else for refraining from producing carbon dioxide, allowing him to produce all he wants.
What if Clinton were to do the same thing--pay other people to be faithful to offset his tomcatting around? As it turns out, there's a Web site allowing him to do just that, CheatNeutral.com:
When you cheat on your partner you add to the heartbreak, pain and jealousy in the atmosphere.
Cheatneutral offsets your cheating by funding someone else to be faithful and NOT cheat. This neutralises the pain and unhappy emotion and leaves you with a clear conscience. . . .
First you should look at ways of reducing your cheating. Once you've done this you can use Cheatneutral to offset the remaining, unavoidable cheating.
All Clinton has to do is shell out a couple of million bucks on cheating offsets, and voilà, he's as credible as Al Gore.
One small caveat: The "small print" page of CheatNeutral.com says the site "is satirical in intent." But this doesn't necessarily mean our plan won't work. It all depends on what the meaning of "is" is.
Celebrity-Americans Fight Back
One great thing about the Internet is that it has brought back the lonely pamphleteer. It has enabled previously voiceless Americans to speak out and get attention. If a presidential candidate had aired an ad a decade or two ago defaming Celebrity-Americans, as John McCain recently did, Celebrity-Americans would have no one to speak for them. But now Paris Hilton--one of the Celebrity-Americans singled out in the McCain ad--has put out her own ad in which she outlines her energy plan:
We can do limited offshore drilling with strict environmental oversight while creating tax incentives to get Detroit making hybrid and electric cars. That way, the offshore drilling carries us until the new technologies kick in, which will then create new jobs and energy independence. Energy crisis solved. I'll see you at the debates, bitches.
One correction: At the debates, the bitches will not see Miss Hilton, who at 27 is constitutionally ineligible to be elected president. She will, however, be old enough to challenge Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Twelve Angry Jihadis
Earlier this week the military completed the first war-crimes trial at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in the case of Salim Ahmed Hamdan. The New York Times responds with an editorial titled "Guilty as Ordered" (ellipsis in original):
Now that was a real nail-biter. The court designed by the White House and its Congressional enablers to guarantee convictions of high-profile detainees in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba--using evidence obtained by torture and secret evidence as desired--has held its first trial. It produced . . . a guilty verdict.
As the Times points out, it also produced a not-guilty verdict:
The only surprise was that Mr. Hamdan was actually acquitted on the more serious count of conspiring (it was unclear with whom) to kill Americans during the invasion of Afghanistan after Sept. 11, 2001.
The charge on which Mr. Hamdan was convicted seemed logical since he did work as Mr. bin Laden's driver. But it was still an odd prosecution. Drivers of even the most heinous people are generally not charged with war crimes.
We wonder if this defense would work in a civilian trial. "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, yes, my client did drive the getaway car. That is why you must acquit him. He's only a driver!" We also wonder how long it will be before the Times starts referring to Hamdan, à la Rodney King, as "motorist Salim Hamdan."
The Times concludes: "We are not arguing that the United States should condone terrorism or those who support it, or that the guilty should not be punished severely." Right, and Nixon is not a crook and Bill Clinton didn't have sexual relations with that woman.
Meanwhile, an Associated Press dispatch about the trial complains that "Hamdan was not judged by a jury of his peers and he received no Miranda warning about his rights."
A jury of his peers? Hey, that's how we'll capture Osama bin Laden: by summoning him for jury duty.
Great Moments in Advertising
The Associated Press reports that the Greyhound bus line has been running ads with the slogan: "There's a reason you've never heard of bus rage."
Actually, we have heard of bus rage. The last time we went Greyhound was in 1990, when we were moving from Washington to New York. The bus drivers union was striking, and the media were filled with reports about union sympathizers shooting at or making bomb threats against Greyhound buses and stations. We were still young enough to be immortal, and poorly enough remunerated that an Amtrak ticket cost a lot of money, so we decided to risk the Greyhound trip.
It was uneventful though exceedingly unpleasant. The only hitch was that the bus was 20 or 30 minutes late, and Greyhound was running a strike-related promotion in which passengers got a free round-trip ticket if their bus arrived more than 15 minutes past the scheduled time. In light of our pecuniary precariousness, we could not justify throwing out the tickets, so we took two more Greyhound trips, during which we reflected that we were lucky not to win second prize (two round-trip tickets).
Anyway, this probably explains why the "bus rage" ad only appeared in Canada.
That turned out to be a problem, though. As the AP notes, Greyhound pulled the ad campaign "after one of its passengers was accused of beheading and cannibalizing another traveler":
Thirty-seven passengers were aboard the Greyhound from Edmonton, Alberta, to Winnipeg, Manitoba, as it traveled at night along a desolate stretch of the TransCanada Highway about 12 miles from Portage La Prairie, Manitoba. Witnesses said Li attacked McLean unprovoked, stabbing him dozens of times.
As horrified passengers fled the bus, Li severed McLean's head, displaying it to some of the passengers outside the bus, witnesses said.
A police officer at the scene reported seeing the attacker hacking off pieces of the victim's body and eating them, according to a police report.
The Canadian Press, however, reports that where Greyhound saw a public-relations problem, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals saw an opportunity to be tasteless and offensive. PETA submitted an ad to the Portage la Prairie Daily Graphic that "uses imagery of 'an innocent victim's throat' being cut, in reference to the slaughter of cows, chickens and pigs on factory farms":
"His struggles and cries are ignored . . . the man with the knife shows no emotion . . . the victim is slaughtered and his head cut off . . . his flesh is eaten," reads the ad, which is posted on the website.
"If this ad leaves a bad taste in your mouth, please give a thought to what sensitive animals think and feel when they come to the end of their frightening journey and see, hear and smell the slaughterhouse."
Of course, if PETA can make sick and inappropriate comparisons, so can people who favor eating tasty animals. Maybe some pro-carnivore group can do an ad depicting the brutal things vegetarians do to a head of lettuce.
Or perhaps a variant of the defunct Greyhound slogan would be more fitting: "There's a reason you've never heard of abattoir rage."
Marrowly Tailored
KIVI-TV in Boise, Idaho, reports on the latest triumph of affirmative action:
A push to get more minorities to donate bone marrow is forcing the closure of the last bone marrow donor program in the Treasure Valley. . . .
St. Luke's says it cannot meet new requirements enacted by the National Marrow Donor Program to encourage more minority donors because the lack of minorities in the region meant the program couldn't meet the requirement to recruit at least 1,000 minority donors a year or the additional requirement to have a full-time recruiter in addition to a coordinator. "We understand the need to recruit more minority donors, but closing the St. Luke's program is not an option we would have preferred," Allen said in a news release.
KIVI reports that marrow tends matched better within ethnic groups, so that the effort at finding minority marrow makes sense. But St. Luke's "says there have been 120 positive donor matches for patients in need of a bone marrow transplant" since the program began in 1991. It hardly makes sense to shut down the program merely because it doesn't have marrow for minorities who don't live in the area anyway.
Lest It Hit Obama's Fans
"With DNC in Mind, City Bans Carrying Urine, Feces"--headline, Rocky Mountain News (Denver), Aug. 4
With DNC in Mind, City Bans Carrying Urine, Feces
"Olympics Clean-Up Hides the Real Beijing"--headline, Associated Press, Aug. 6
Coming Attractions
• "Freddie's Nightmare Continues"--headline, Indianapolis Star, Aug. 7
Better Hope The Theater's Dark
"Movie Gem From Down Under Is Sure to Charm Your Pants Off"--headline, Arizona Daily Star (Tucson), Aug. 7
Of Course, for Want of Prehensile Paws, There's Not Much a Lion Can Do With a Machete
"Woman Riding a Donkey Fights Off Lion With Machete"--headline, Associated Press, Aug. 6
Why Would They Need a System for That?
"System Lets Students Eat With Fingers"--headline, District Administration, August
Metus Est Plena Tyrannis
"Florida Teen Stabs Father With Miniature Sword Over Haircut"--headline, FoxNews.com, Aug. 6
What's the Age of Majority-Minority?
"Children Becoming Majority-Minority in 5 Counties"--headline, Associated Press, Aug. 7
Everything Seemingly Is Spinning Out of Control
• "119 Illegal African Clawed Frogs Seized in Nevada"--headline, Associated Press, Aug. 6
• "Pack of Wild Dogs Overruns Elementary School in Puerto Rico, Forcing Shutdown"--headline, Canadian Press, Aug. 7
• "3 Million Bees Found in Miami Home"--headline, United Press International, Aug. 6
• "Dog Cloner Denies She Was Mormon Sex Kidnapper Joyce McKinney"--headline, Times (London), Aug. 7
• "Jupiter and Its Moons Prepare Nuclear Winters for Earth"--headline, Pravda, Aug. 6
Breaking News From 2000 B.C.
"Morris: Obama Taxes Equal 'Mammoth Depression' "--headline, Newsmax.com, Aug. 5
Breaking News From 1864
"Georgia Reports 'Large-Scale Battles' in Rebel Region"--headline, Agence France-Presse, Aug. 7
Breaking News From 1901
"Red Sox, White Sox Meet for First Time"--headline, MLB.com, Aug. 7
Breaking News From 2014
"Unemployment Highest in 6 Years"--headline, Associated Press, Aug. 7
News of the Tautological
• "Illegal Aliens Won't Leave Voluntarily"--headline, Intelligencer (Wheeling, W.Va.), Aug. 7
• "Body Found at Park Is That of Missing Man"--headline, Indianapolis Star, Aug. 6
News You Can Use
• "Antiques: They're Really Worth What the Buyer Will Pay"--headline, Grand Rapids (Mich.) Press, Aug. 7
• "Who Can You Sue? Click Here"--headline, Time.com, Aug. 6
• "Waterboarding an Attraction at New York Amusement Park"--headline, Reuters, Aug. 7
• "Where the Super Hot Babes Go to Play"--headline, MSNBC.com, Aug. 5
Bottom Story of the Day
"China Rejects Bush Criticism of Its Affairs"--headline, Associated Press, Aug. 7
Bad Trip
Have you seen "Deliverance"? If not, consider yourself warned: This item contains spoilers.
"Deliverance" (1972) tells the tale of four Atlanta businessmen who go for a canoe trip through backcountry Georgia. Once they set off, Murphy's law kicks in: First Ned Beatty is sexually violated by a perverted hillbilly. Then Burt Reynolds kills the pervert with his crossbow and, despairing of getting a fair trial from a jury of the hillbilly's peers (read cousins), he buries the corpse and the men flee.
Ronny Cox drowns (although Reynolds says he is shot), and the boats spin out of control, causing Reynolds to break his leg. Later, Jon Voight scales a cliff and wounds himself with his own crossbow while killing an innocent man he mistakes for the pervert's edentate sidekick.
When all is said and done, the three survivors are left wishing they had opted for a staycation. All agree to take the story to their graves.
You watch "Deliverance" today, and you think: If only they'd had GPS, they could have avoided all that trouble. Well, don't be so sure. Consider this Associated Press dispatch from Cannonville, Utah:
A GPS device led a convoy of tourists astray, finally stranding them on the edge of a sheer cliff.
With little food or water, the group of 10 children and 16 adults from California had to spend a night in their cars deep inside the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
They used a global positioning device to plot out a backcountry route Saturday from Bryce Canyon National Park to the Grand Canyon.
But the device couldn't tell how rough the roads were. One vehicle got stuck in soft sand, two others ran low on fuel. And the device offered suggestions that led them onto the wrong dirt roads, which ended at a series of cliffs.
The group was so lost it couldn't figure out how to backtrack and started to panic. Kids were crying, and one infant was sick with fever, according to a member of the party.
"It was a nightmare--the vacation from hell," Daniel Cohen, back home safely in Los Angeles, told The Associated Press on Tuesday. "That's a story I will tell my kids. For now, I don't want anybody to know about it."
Cohen seems to be a guy who doesn't completely think things through. After all, if he doesn't want to anybody to know about the trip, why would he tell the AP about it?
Then again, the "Deliverance" guys were even less clever. They didn't want anyone to know about their trip, so what did they do? They made a movie about it.
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