By Peter Galuszka
Reading the Bacon’s Rebellion Blog always displays breathtaking contradictions. Chief among them is the huge contradiction between pushing “smart growth” and shunning any form of increasing gasoline taxation.
The crux is that we have lots of horrendous sprawl in the state such as all of Northern Virginia, Route 3 in Fredericksburg and U.S. 29 in Charlottesville. We have underfunded and under-maintained roads. That all adds up to a death spiral of bad planning and a slavish adherence to el-cheapo ways of doing things – all in the name of the Cato Institute.
In Virginia, for instance, the state gasoline tax is 17.5 cents a gallon. It hasn’t been raised in 25 years. It hasn’t even been made to adjust for inflation. By contrast, North Carolina’s gas tax is 38.9 cents per gallon.
As politicians, especially Republicans such as Gov. Robert F. McDonnell stubbornly refuse to consider the obvious solution to their many road issues, they have the rest of us jumping through one convoluted hoop after the other trying complicated ways to get funds without taxation. It’s a bit like trying to breathe without air.
That brings up another point – the insane accusations that Barack Obama is responsible for $4 a gallon gasoline. GOPers like Mitt Romney and Bobby Jindal (oil state guy) claim that gasoline prices have doubled under Obama and his energy policies are now creating havoc at the pump. The reality is that setting gasoline prices has a lot more to do with Asian demand the Iranian nuclear facilities than the policies of one U.S. president, who, by the way, has made big progress in weaning the country away from foreign oil.
Yet the biggest irony is spelled out in the latest issue of The New Yorker and comes, surprise, from Romney’s own economics adviser, Greg Mankiw. The Harvard professor recently wrote: “Economists who have added up all the externalities associated with driving conclude that a tax exceeding $2 a gallon makes sense…By taxing bad things more, we could tax good things less.”
Now, if you happen to read Bacon’s Rebellion’s most prominent blogger, we get an education how smart growth could make our lives better. We need to build more housing in more densely-packed areas, go for green zones, reduce wasteful and polluting gasoline use and try mass transit (all dipped in a libertarian flavor of course!)
The unspoken part is what Mankiw brings up. Federal gas tax is a puny 18.4 cents a gallon. If you raise it to $2 a gallon, as Mankiw suggests, you’d suddenly have smart growth – presto! You’d have a lot of other things, too, such as much higher mileage cars, a fatter federal checkbook and less stupidity when it comes to highway and housing planning.
Are we going to get this? Of course not. The status quo politicians are hardly going to pretend the gas hike issue exists while blaming Obama for something not of his making. Meanwhile, readers of Bacon’s Rebellion will be treated to the increasingly amusing acts of contortionists stretching and folding any way they can to avoid discussing tax hikes. As a former altar boy I can appreciate trying to keep the dogma pure.
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