Americans grow up

CBS/Times poll: We reject gas-tax holiday

Posted by Charles Komanoff (Guest Contributor) at 8:54 PM on 04 May 2008

Read more about: oil | energy | Barack Obama | politics

The margin was narrow -- 4 percentage points. And 5 percent of those polled didn't choose sides. But a CBS News/NY Times poll released Sunday just might signal the moment when Americans began to grasp the intertwined realities of climate, energy and national security.

The poll [PDF] found that 49 percent of Americans think suspending the gasoline tax this summer is a bad idea, while 45 percent approve of the plan (see Question 49).

If memory serves, this is the first time in at least a generation that the American public expressed a willingness to be taxed more rather than less for energy.

This isn't just economists talking, like the 150 dismal scientists who over the weekend issued a statement calling suspension of the federal tax on gasoline this summer "a bad idea" because, among other reasons, it "would generate major profits for oil companies rather than significantly lowering prices for consumers [and] would encourage people to keep buying costly imported oil and do nothing to encourage conservation." No, this is good old, hard-pressed, subprime-scared Americans.

A week ago, when I posted to Grist about Obama, McCain, Clinton and the gas-tax holiday, I didn't imagine that a plurality of my fellow citizens might be ready to embrace my conclusion: that this century's defining energy policy issue is energy prices that tell the truth.

OK, it's just one poll, and a carbon tax isn't necessarily around the next corner. But for someone who has toiled for decades for measures to internalize the external costs of everything from nukes and jet skis to driving and carbon, this poll is sweet indeed.

And this too: that more Americans than not want to hold on to the gas tax in the face of $4 pump prices is due in no small measure to Barack Obama's hammering against the tax holiday. We'll be in a better position to see on Wednesday morning, but it could be that Sen. Obama's appeal to principle and the greater good is standing him in good stead with voters in North Carolina and Indiana.

If that proves true, then it might not be beyond possibility that the campaign's final six months could see serious discussion of a revenue-neutral carbon tax as a climate solution.

For story: Americans grow up
10 Comments | Post a Comment

Bravo America

About time. Taxes can help. Do it smartly this time.

-JChan

by JChan111 at 10:27 PM on 04 May 2008

An important point is

The federal tax on gasoline is not just an excise tax, like the ones in Europe and Australia, which raise significant funds for the government's general use: it is a hypothecated (earmarked) tax that funds the Highway Trust Fund. That is to say, it is essentially a user fee to help cover the wear and tear on the nation's highways. (A small portion of the funds also go to help finance mass transit.)

Even with those revenues (and others, coming from truck-related taxes on truck tires, sales of trucks and trailers, and heavy vehicle use), every several years the U.S. Congress has to find additional money to finance the building of new roads, and to repair infrastructure, like bridges.

So giving a tax holiday would be tantamount to robbing Peter (general taxpayers) to pay Paul (disproportionally, people who drive gas guzzlers, or commute from distant suburbs, often both).

These are only my personal opinions.

by Ron Steenblik at 11:42 PM on 04 May 2008

Americans dodge potholes

Most people seem to understand that gasoline taxes are used primarily to fund road maintenance and repair. Right now the state of the nation's roads is dismal and declining. A full tank of gas is useless if you need a rock crawler to get to work.

That said I must say I'm shocked that 'mericans didn't vote for the offer of a big rock candy mountain just one more time. Maybe we can actually learn that "you pay now or you pay more later" lesson.

Put the Carbon Back

by Pangolin at 2:45 AM on 05 May 2008

Huh

Barack apparently does support a tax removal though, of a different type.

He wants to remove the income tax for people with lower income. To target those hurt most by rising prices in all aspects. Gas, Food, Healthcare, etc.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/us/politics/04economy.h ...

Hrmm I wonder where he could have gotten that idea...
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/7/16/10514/2839

by GreyFlcn at 5:19 AM on 05 May 2008

Media get some credit

I'd like to think that part of this result is due to the reporting on this issue. For what seems like the first time this century, news outlets actually did some analysis on the issue instead of simply repeating what the politicians said. They've called the proposal what it is: a stupid idea.

by cgurkin at 7:50 AM on 05 May 2008

meanwhile

Abu Dhabi, of all places, with 10% of the world's petroleum, has started construction of Masdar City, a city of 50,000 which will run entirely on only renewable energy. Must be that anti-petroleum mindset of their leftist leaders, eh?

Even China with their coal plant a week habit is on the path to a low-carbon economy; their latest five-year plan calls for a 20% improvement in energy efficiency by 2010.

I remember a time when the US was a world leader. So long ago. The US used to lead the world in solar cell production; now our production is actually dropping; not just as a percentage of world output, but total production. And Congress, in its wisdom, decides this is the time to allow the solar and wind power investment tax credits to expire. Not the oil and gas tax credits, though, they're renewed.

Makes perfect economic sense; throw away our lead in a rapidly increasing globally hot technology in order to focus our investment in a rapidly declining technology centered on a raw material of which we do not own enough to even cover our own needs.

by gzuckier at 8:01 AM on 05 May 2008

Which raises the question:

Why does Congress hate America?

by GonzoDon at 10:46 AM on 05 May 2008

Americans Making Prices Tell the Truth

Economic markets are very effective devices for shaping choices. When the price of something actually reflects the cost of creating it, then prices give consumers appropriate cues, shifting choices toward those things that didn't damage the environment much, don't use scarce resources, and aren't a lot of work to make.

If the market price doesn't reflect the environmental and social cost, people have to use a lot of mental energy to search out the true costs, and then exercise self discipline to act contrary to the best deal indicated by the prices they face.

Also, when market prices do not align with true costs, the social and environmental costs are getting dumped on someone "external" to the market--future generations, global environment, neighbors downstream or downwind of the coal plant, ecosystems that don't participate in the markets.

Bringing all those external cost-absorbers into the market requires either a very active legal system where they can sue whoever's damaged them, or government regulatory action to make the prices tell the whole truth.

Such as, the carbon tax. Also, a biodiversity tax, an environmental hormone disruptor tax, a noise tax, an ugliness tax on trash and billboards, and so many other adjustments to compensate for the ways in which some industries and consumers wreck others' surroundings.

Well, if we want to make the market work right, we have to make it tell the truth. It's heartening to know that American consumers may be catching on.

I don't think we Americans are stupid. But we have been appallingly misinformed and manipulated. Our wants have been pumped up beyond our needs through an endless drumbeat of advertising, and we have been trained to be afraid and to seek emotional security through consumption. Appropriate pricing may shift our consumption in appropriate directions, but it will not help us to recognize when we have enough. That requires a cultural shift, one that will bring us to identify ourselves as community members more than as consumers.

-- Love doesn't just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new. --Ursula LeGuin

by racje at 12:07 PM on 05 May 2008

racje

Every word you say here is spot on. In the realm of economy there is only this stark lucid morality:

The willing participants in any transaction pay the FULL costs of that transaction.
ALL externalities be FULLY compensated.

Anything beyond this is simple turpitude, simple infamy.
That this would perhaps render impossible the size and complexity and efficiency and "growth" of the monster is just proof of how it is and can be built only on violence and lies, and how anyone who supports it is a villain.

I am often discouraged how many who claim to care about social and environmental causes neglect this simple philosophical basis, in favor of instrumentalism. But it seems to me if you don't have a solid core, you can't construct an earth around it.

A terminological point, I can't believe how many progressives and environmentalists blithely use such terms as "free" market, "free" trade, "free"way, thereby conceding this critcal propaganda battlefield to the enemy. I see examples every day.
Yes, the Right very much wants people to think everything is flowing logically, freely, morally. That's why they invented this bogus vocabulary.

Why not insist at every point that there is no "free" market, never has been, never will be. If Thatcher and her ilk can say "There's no such thing as society", why not retort with the truth, "There's no such thing as the market".

Although it's hard to find evidence, I'd like to believe that deep down people aren't all bad, just misguided. Well, a good place to start would be to attack this myth of market "freedom", since there's no such thing.

Except of course for free riding.

by Russ at 12:54 PM on 05 May 2008

Gas Tax

Let's abolish the gas tax and privatize roads. No one will be robbing anyone that way. The government won't get money for gas they have no role in producing, and your taxes for roads won't be wasted by an inefficient government. The government gets enough money for roads; higher taxes are not the solution.

by kirasaffron at 12:59 PM on 05 May 2008

ADVERTISING POLICY

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