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Johnpeter

The “sheet metal worker”, regular guy she went with was driving a Ford F250 and the security detail behind them consisted of about a half dozen SUV’s. Probably none of those vehicles gets much over twelve miles per gallon.

If you want to pay less for gas, use less. It ain’t that complicated. The U.S. needs what they would call in Economics 101 a shift in the demand curve. A big decrease in U.S. consumption is the only thing that has the potential to cause prices to drop right now.

Also for the record, I have wired folks who could afford it off the grid completely (also an electrician) wind-solar-diesel or propane combos. Solar and wind etc are clean feel good mother earth magazine things to do, and that’s great. But the US needs a high horsepower steel-nuclear industrialized backbone to support our future forays into folly. Take the french; why won’t Clinton laud their nuke program instead of their state-controlled medical model, which is almost as bad as the canadian?

And please, let’s not starve a bunch of folks pouring corn into our gas tanks, please!!

Anyone?

Beyond the fact that it is a valid Pigou tax, one of the reasons the gas tax is one of the few taxes that I think make theoretical sense is that – as you point out – it hastens the growth of alternative energy sources. This is a fact that politicians actively choose to ignore and that all too easily gets shut out of the debate over energy policy. The reason for this is very simple: politicians rarely seek to implement actual good policy, but instead almost always seek primarily to maximize their own power (there are some exceptions to this); unfortunately, it’s much easier to maintain power if you can attack the gas companies for high oil prices and/or argue irrationally that high gas prices are the result of too much taxation.

Something that libertarians and economists of various political stripes have been pointing out for a long while is that as oil becomes more and more expensive, alternative energies will become relatively less expensive. As that happens, more resources will be shifted towards those energy sources, making them not only less expensive by comparison, but also reducing their price in real terms. More importantly, the energy sources that will become popular will become so because of their actual utility rather than because some politician decides that one form of energy is more worthy of investment than another due to the fact that his district produces that form of energy but does not produce the other one (see, e.g., corn-based ethanol).

From the perspective of environmental policy, an appropriately sized gas tax is really one of the best things that can be done. From the perspective of tax policy, it’s one of the least intrusive forms of taxation. In fact I would support a massive, massive increase in the gas tax if it were combined with an offsetting tax cut of some sort to mitigate the resulting increase in cost of living (the offset, FWIW, would not need to be as large as the tax increase in my hypothetical since the purpose of the gas tax is not to raise revenue so much as it is to make people bear the cost of their negative externalities and encourage the economic viability of cleaner (and possibly renewable) energy.

In any event – another thing I agree with you about is that the price of gas in this country remains surprisingly low when compared with most of the rest of the world even before the current escalation in prices.

As for Hillary Clinton’s willingness to jump in lockstep with Republicans of late, I would just remind you what I’ve been saying for years: the woman has no guiding principle beyond her own lust for power. The advancement of “Progressive” ideals is not an end to her; instead, “Progressivism” in the form of Democratic Party politics is simply a vehicle within which she can obtain power.
I can virtually guarantee that a President Hillary Clinton would be virtually identical to the current imperial Presidency, except for two relatively minor differences (in the grand scheme of things):
1. The most power-obsessed member of a Hillary Clinton administration will actually be the President, as opposed to now when it is the Vice President and his staff.
2. The interest groups to which the President will be indebted will be only slightly different (and this potential difference is becoming smaller by the day as Hillary continues to ally herself with toadies like Limbaugh and O’Reilly).

I’ve said this before, and I will say it again: it is completely and utterly irrational to criticize the abuses of power in the Bush Administration and support Hillary Clinton.

My impression is that Americans look back at past, lower prices, thinking that that is where they are going. This, by definition, devalues investment that will lower consumption in the future in the face of rising prices. When it comes to energy efficiency, Americans already want a payback period of 30 months or less. (Much better than almost anyone gets from investments.) If they are underestimating the future costs to be avoided, that drives the formula even worse.

To create certainty that tomorrow’s gasoline would be more expensive than today’s (which is the likely scenario with Global Warming), Energize America (www.ea2020.org) proposed to fund all its programs with an incrementally introduced gasoline tax, 1 cent/month/indefinitely. In the face of this, individuals and business would ‘invest’ to lower tomorrow’s energy requirements. And, manufacturers would invest to build ever more efficient vehicles.