We are approximately three Friedman units away from a gas tax

I generally avoid Thomas Friedman op-eds because the man doesn’t have a relax button; in his life, everything is either boom or bust, huge or irrelevant, ground breaking or meaningless.  (Matt Taibi’s smackdowns of TF, here and here, are pretty good.)  He’s like your ADD cousin but with a national column attached, and you usually love him anyway.

But I give him plenty of props (H/T to Yglesias)  for his Saturday op-ed. The title is “Real Men Tax Gas,” which pretty much tells you what he’s about.  It’s an article with the sarcasm you don’t normally see from a major columnist, especially not one whose last name isn’t Dowd.  Money quote:

In sum, we would be physically healthier, economically healthier and strategically healthier. And yet, amazingly, even talking about such a tax is “off the table” in Washington. You can’t mention it. But sending your neighbor’s son or daughter to risk their lives in Afghanistan? No problem. Talk away. Pound your chest.

I am not sure what the right troop number is for Afghanistan; I need to hear more. But I sure know this: There is something wrong when our country is willing to consider spending more lives and treasure in Afghanistan, where winning is highly uncertain, but can’t even talk about a gasoline tax, which is win, win, win, win, win — with no uncertainty at all.

Though he’s writing about the gas tax, his larger message is the failure of our political will.  A pretty level-headed analysis shows that a gas tax can be implemented that could pay down the debt, help fund public transport, and offset the detrimental impact on poor people, not to mention its huge positive impacts on our foreign policy.  He also points to our failure around nuclear energy policy and a carbon tax.