A gas or energy tax seems unthinkable, but WSJ’s David Wessel says the national deficit and climate change could soon make it a reality.
Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data, ability to repeat discredited memes, and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Also, be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor even implied. Any irrelevancies you can mention will also be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.
"Overall household indebtedness is up from $7 trillion to almost $10 trillion since 2000. On this sum, we estimate, the American consumer has an annual interest bill of more than $500 billion; a sum, by the way, that vastly exceeds his current income growth." —Kurt Richebacher
Knowing that the vote over the weekend in Greece was really a referendum on Euro membership, a majority of the Greek Parliament said yes to staying. European Finance Ministers meet again on Wednesday to solidify the 2nd bailout package for Greece at the same time hopefully a deal is consummated between Greece and its creditors this week. The Greek 14.5b euro bond that matures on March 20th is up by 2 pts. The optimism that all will be completed and contained AGAIN to Greece has yields lower in Portugal, Spain and Italy. The iTraxx Financial Index is also narrower by...
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December 28th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
Sooooooooo….. Ross Perot was right all along.
December 28th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
LOOOOOOOOONG overdue – most other industrialized nations have MUCH larger gas taxes than we do.
They know importing vast quantities of oil is bad for thier country – and tax accordingly to change behavior. Guess what – it works.
Gas is $6.50 a Gallon in the Netherlands:
http://money.cnn.com/pf/features/lists/global_gasprices/
December 28th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Let market forces work. We need to institute gasoline tax rates on a car-by-car basis that are inversely proportional to the gas mileage.
Your car mpg exceeds the average: you pay a lower tax rate per gallon for being energy efficient.
Your car mpg is less than the average: you pay a higher tax rate per gallon for being an energy hog.
Scale this in over time. Give the market time to adjust to the rate structure. Consumers will do what is in their financial interest over time. Some will choose to be energy hogs – nothing wrong with that as long as those of us who choose to be energy efficient don’t have to pay for the excesses of energy hogs.
Let market forces work.
And for those who say this is impractical to implement: if the government can figure out how to collect highway tolls based on location and time-of-usage then collecting gasoline taxes on a variable basis should be a piece of cake.
December 28th, 2009 at 9:27 pm
Go ahead. Raise taxes on gasoline. Take more money out of consumers’ wallets. That oughta help the economy.
Raise taxes on diesel. That’ll *really* work at helping businesses find money to re-hire people.