Like a holiday, except awful in every way
Kevin Drum has made me feel guilty about not covering the “gas-tax holiday” flap in greater detail. There’s an actual substantive policy issue here that sheds lights on the differences between the presidential candidates, so let’s give it a full airing.
Americans, you may have noticed, are freaking out about gasoline prices, which are rising due to various structural issues that are unlikely to go away anytime soon. That’s a difficult issue for a politician to avoid in an election year, so John McCain proposed suspending the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents per gallon, during the summer driving season, as a sop to drivers.
This is an unbelievably bad idea. It’s so bad, in fact, that intrepid journalists have been unable to find a single expert, from any part of the political spectrum, willing to speak up in its favor.
The best take-down of the proposal comes from Tom Friedman, who notes that the policy amounts to borrowing money from China (in the form of an increased deficit) and shipping it to Saudi Arabia (by boosting oil purchases). A much longer take-down comes from Jonathan Alter at Newsweek. To summarize:
- A gas-tax holiday would fail to provide relief to consumers. Not only are the sums at stake piddling, but the windfall would likely go to oil companies, not drivers.
- A gas-tax holiday is environmentally irresponsible. Providing inducements to drive is exactly what we don’t want to be doing right now.
- As gas-tax holiday is fiscally irresponsible. The federal excise tax on gasoline is used to fund improvements in our crumbling highway infrastructure.
- A gas-tax holiday is shortsighted. Gas prices are going to keep going up, and up, and up. Insofar as high fuel costs are a problem, solutions need to be long-term and structural.
The plan was such a howler that Hillary Clinton decided to do the obvious thing: announce that she too supports a gas-tax holiday, thus making Obama the sole presidential candidate to opt out of this shameless pander. In fact, he’s now running an ad on the issue.
Of course, Obama isn’t spotless. He is running for president, after all, and his ad features mini-panders, such as a promise to investigate “price gouging” by oil companies. But this is minor stuff compared to the gas-tax holiday. Good for Obama.
Contextual note 1: years ago, in a crass ploy to appeal to voters alarmed by gas prices that had reached $1.50 a gallon, a presidential contender proposed releasing oil from the strategic petroleum reserve. I speak, of course, of Al Gore during the 2000 election. Politicians do this stuff during elections because it gets votes. McCain and Clinton will probably both reap a benefit from the issue, and Obama, sadly, will not.
Contextual note 2: Tim Kaine, the Democratic governor of Virginia, just proposed a gas tax increase to cover a budget shortfall. So some politicians do get it. Of course, Tim Kaine isn’t up for re-election, and he never will be: term limits mean this will be his last stint as governor. Still, good for Tim Kaine.
A further note on sacrifice
The discussion thread on sacrifice is interesting, and makes me realize that I glossed two fairly important points that need to be made more explicit.
Point 1: the people arguing that climate change will require sacrifice are generally the same ones arguing that we shouldn’t do anything about climate change.
I am not, of course, referring to the readers of this blog. But please be aware that the rhetoric of the debate over global warming has shifted dramatically. Before, global warming was a hoax, the science was uncertain, etc. Now that that argument has been lost, global warming is too expensive to fix, the proposed solutions will be ruinous to our economy and our way of life, etc. There has been a steady drumbeat of this over the past few months, and it’s going to get worse — a lot worse — as we get closer to passing some actual legislation.
That’s the funny thing about these calls for sacrifice. They rarely seem to come from people working hardest to address the crisis. Environmental Defense Fund, for example, recently put together an excellent report citing the absolute urgency of addressing global warming, and putting the cost to Americans at “pennies a day.” EDF isn’t calling for sacrifice. They calling for good laws that will put us on a path to clean energy.
Addressing climate change will not threaten our prosperity, full stop. The people claiming it will are the same ones arguing for inaction. Don’t be fooled. More importantly, when you hear this untruth passed along as conventional wisdom, speak up. Study after study suggests the economic impact of climate change legislation will be minimal.
Point 2: conservation and “sacrifice” aren’t the same thing.
Curtailing demand for energy is one of the best levers we have — especially in the near term — for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Conservation certainly won’t get us all the way to where we need to be, but it can buy us a lot of time. Best of all, conservation is the proverbial lunch we’re paid to eat. Many energy-saving practices pay for themselves in short order.
There’s a lot more to be said on this topic, which I’ll save for a future post. There’s also a very boring semantic debate to be had on the difference between conservation and sacrifice and where exactly one bleeds into the other. But let’s skip it, screw in some CFLs, and start lobbying our representatives for meaningful change.
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