Quote:
Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Burger's point is that if you want to discourage the consumption of gas, tax gas. AG's is that you can also tax vehicles that consume gas. Both seem right, except that the latter is less comprehensive (because things other than new cars consume gas). Neither is particularly utopian, but neither is likely to happen as long as politicians care about being re-elected. The fact that some conservatives are now talking about taxing gas, however, would seem to be a fairly strong indicator that this Iraq thing isn't working out, and so people are looking for ways to disengage.
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Lest I be accused of calling taxation Utopian, my point was merely that, unlike cigarette taxes in which the policy behind the tax is to discourage smoking
in toto, the taxes used to effectuate the ultimate
goal of minimizing petroleum dependence needs to accomodate the overall desirability of cheap and easy transportation. In other words, it has to account for the possibility that we might inadvertently raise the overall cost of getting Person A from point B to point C. Which is something like enacting a tax on breathing because some breathers smoke, and smokers tend to take more (and shallower) breaths.
My idea is that, because not all people can be forced into petroleum-independent forms of transportation, we live in a world in which encouraging the production of cars that are more fuel efficient makes sense for the drivers who are so dependent on petroleum-consuming transportation that they are price-insensitive to gasoline. They need to drive 40 miles a day, no matter what it costs. It's easy for those of us who live in cities (hi, Burger!) to assume there must be
some alternative transportation, such that increasing the marginal cost will incent them to take it, but it isn't always so, and won't be anytime soon. To say that incenting the selection of fuel efficient replacement vehicles is bad policy tends to show that you don't live in the real world --- a brutal reality check that conservatives usually aren't usually accused of failing to take.
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