Car and Driver wants higher gas taxes

Through high school, I was an avid fan of Car and Driver, the best car magazine on the planet.  For some reason, the magazine also had a very right-of-center editorial bias that I never quite got: their favorite cars were (are?) German, but the Christian Democrat Union’s platform is decidedly left of anything the magazine’s editors would support.  So I was quite surprised to see a C&D columnist pushing for a gas tax.

The hero is Aaron Robinson.  He’s come to the magazine since I stopped reading, so I can’t tell you if he is generally more liberal than his compatriots.  Robinson’s basic point is spot on: because taxes are so taboo, we instead get stricter and stricter CAFE regulations.  These regulations are determined solely by the executive branch and are passed to consumers in the form of higher car prices.  In other words, Republicans’ smear campaign against taxes means we resort to top-down regulation (the EPA and CAFE standards) instead of a free market solution.  (Private firms will never voluntarily price in externalities.)

Robinson:

Tax increases make voters grumpy toward incumbents, which is why politicians go through absurd political contortions to avoid the mere mention of them. Instead of enacting something that everyone hates, they resort to policy that no one understands, such as CAFE. So convoluted are the new rules that you’re in for a couple dozen readings of the 1469-page “Light Duty Vehicle Greenhouse Gas Emissions Standards and Corporate Average Fuel Economy Stand­ards; Final Rule” to understand it.To wit: The Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which jointly administer CAFE, can’t agree on how to measure fuel economy. One agency rewards savings from higher-efficiency air conditioners; one doesn’t. So the 2016 standard is either 34.1 mpg or 35.5 mpg depending on whose number a person chooses to embrace.

Please, can’t we even discuss a gasoline tax without somebody calling somebody an America-hating socialist?

I didn’t realize that Robinson has an arch economic conservative’s support up his sleeve: even Greg Mankiw  supports a gas tax. The case for a gas tax is so clear that I don’t need to summarize Mankiw’s report.  He does, in addition, have a good grasp of the political reality of gas taxes:

As judged on purely political terms, higher Pigovian taxes are a wacky idea. I have yet to see a major candidate for President endorse the concept. In 2004, John Kerry denied being in favor of high gas taxes. His campaign said that it was Bush adviser Greg Mankiw who in fact favored high gas taxes. That retort was correct—I had written in favor of higher gasoline taxes several times. But it was not particularly effective: Few voters had any idea who Greg Mankiw was.

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