Friedman tells Americans: Tax gasoline! Dump Hummers!

Friedman tells Americans: Tax gasoline! Dump Hummers!

This is a column about the war of ideas ? but first a word about gasoline prices and Hummers.

In case you missed it, OPEC just decided to slash its oil production to keep gasoline prices high. I guess it would be foolhardy to expect that maybe Saudi Arabia or Kuwait would use its influence in OPEC to hold down prices at a time when Western economies are struggling to climb out of recession. Everybody's just looking out for themselves. So why don't we?

There's all sorts of talk now about how to finance the $87 billion price tag for the reconstruction of Iraq. I say, let's make OPEC pay ? indirectly. Let's have a $1 a gallon gasoline tax and call it the "Patriot Tax." We could use the revenue it would raise ? about $110 billion a year ? to finance the entire reconstruction of Iraq, with plenty left for other good works.

Here's the logic: The two things OPEC hates most are falling oil prices and gasoline taxes ? and the Patriot Tax would promote both. The reason that OPEC hates gasoline taxes is that if anyone is going to benefit from higher prices at the pump, OPEC wants it to be OPEC, not the consuming countries. It drives OPEC crazy that the Europeans pay roughly twice as much per gallon as Americans do, because their governments slap on so many taxes.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/05/opinion/05FRIE.html

such BS :nopity:

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but aside from the obvious problem of getting them passed, the Law of Unintended Consequences tends to kick in.

First problem is the profits car companies make from trucks is vastly reduced if people start seriously moving to econoboxes. Then we see the ripples from the UAW workforce further reduced to independant gas stations and car dealers making less money.

Who knows where it all ends?

btw, every so often someone pops up with the idea of raising the NJ gas tax by a nickel to get rid of the hated Turnpike and Parkway tolls. As much as people hate the tolls, they hate the thought of a lousy nickel tax even more. Go figure, but the idea is killed every time before it even gets to a rational discussion.

I remember the outrage in 1993 when Clinton proposed an energy tax, how it had to be scaled down, and the oposition from many of the Democrats in congress. There is no way this Republican Congress would pass this. I am for higher fuel taxes for environmental reasons, mostly to encourage the use and development of better fuel efficancy/spur public transportation. However I don't want regressive forms of taxation used to pay for this Iraq blunder. Take Bush's BS tax cuts for the upper incomes away and you have your 87 billion and then some.

I'm a fellow New Jersian and I here you about scraping the tolls in the Turnpike and Parkway. The opposition to doing this comes from the toll collectors unions and individuals who don't use the roads resenting they have to pay a tax for a road they don't use. This is of course nonsense because without these roads the states economy would not be what it is. Even if residents don't use the roads they still benefiet inderectly.

"Even A blind Hog Can Find an Acorn or Two."

But not now. Any and all taxes collected would simply be siphoned off into the pockets of the Bush Crime Family, to fund their lifestyles.

No friggin' way. Uhuh. When pigs file flight plans.

but this is as dumb as it gets. This fool needs to be fired right now. Tom didn't get his oil bonanza from the war he whored so hard for. Now we get to pay a "patriot tax"?
Hey Tom! How about this. You and your rich warmonger friends pay for the little Iraqi adventure. You pay for the human misery of death and permanent injuries on all sides. You pay for the destruction of the infrastructures that will drive the human toll even higher.

Tom, I would say God damn your soul,but you sold it long ago.

Few will argue with Mr. Friedman that America needs to conserve petroleum products. Raising the price of gasoline and discouraging people from purchasing and driving gas-guzzlers like Hummers is certainly part of that equasion.

However, Friedman is still stuck on this idea that the Iraq war was a noble cause or even related to the fight against global terrorism. It wasn't. It was about avoiding the difficult decisions of which he speaks. The invasion of Iraq was PNAC's extention of the Cheney energy plan: sell more fossil fuel and don't present an alternative that would threaten the profits of Bush cronies. The war was fought to put Iraqi oil revenues in the pockets of thugs like Lee Reynolds and encourage thougtless people to keep driving Hummers and SUVs. Some reports are now showing that plan didn't work out any better than anything else in Iraq, but I digress.

Among the purposes of an energy policy based on conservation and the development of renewable energy is to make resource wars like the invasion of Iraq less attractive to would-be colonialists in the developed world. Such a policy does not work hand-in-hand with the goals of those who support Bush and his wars. On the contrary, it is a policy aimed at making Bush-style colonialism obsolete.