Just when you think this campaign couldn’t get more depressing, you have this moronic exchange on gas prices. They’re Bush’s fault; they’d be worse under Kerry. Etc. Now I know I just came out as a non-driver, and so full disclosure is unnecessary. But the low taxes on gas in this country surely are a bad idea. Here’s an easy way to help ease the budget deficit, increase our fuel efficiency, wean us a little off Middle East petroleum and generally help the U.S. economically and in foreign policy. Yet the very idea of raising taxes on gasoline is regarded as so completely anathema you might as well propose nominating Osama bin Laden for president. Matt Miller explains in his syndicated column:
In France and Germany, a gallon of gas costs around $4; in Japan, about $3.50. Thanks in part to their policy of high-priced gas, our industrial competitors have made stunning strides in energy efficiency and independence. France now gets more than 70 percent of its electrical energy from nuclear power. In Japan, oil imports in 1980 were 5.5 percent of GDP; by decade’s end, they’d fallen to 1 percent. The industrial restructuring that enabled this drop left Japan producing two and a half times its 1975 output with, in effect, the same tank of gas.
It’s not that the United States has made no progress. Economy-wide energy efficiency is up by more than 40 percent since 1975. Average auto fuel efficiency has risen from 16 to 20.4 miles per gallon over the same period. Still, the average fuel economy of the new car fleet has fallen every year since 1986, from a high of 25.9 miles per gallon to about 23.8 today. And American drivers still consume about two times more gasoline per capita than people in other advanced countries.
At roughly a billion dollars per penny in annual revenue, a 50-cent gas tax would help fund needed programs or needed deficit reduction. It would also substitute a market-based approach to auto efficiency for today’s mixed signals, through which low prices urge consumers to buy SUVs, while mileage-minded regulators tell the big three to build compacts.
So why not? Beats me. But this irrational embrace of cheap gas is about as close to a national consensus as you’ll ever get in this polarized country. Go figure.
The Dish 