The Idea Blog

After posting the Ford pick-up photo, I came across this from Allan Sloan’s “The Deal” column in the current (May 12, 2008) Fortune:

“Had the Bush administration and Congress exhibited the wisdom and courage to slap a big honking gasoline tax on drivers after 9/11 - or even in 2006, when the President made his “addiction to oil” speech - it would have been a better energy policy than the cornographic panacea they’ve given us. We could have reduced consumption, cut oil imports, kept low-income drivers whole by rebating their gas taxes with income tax breaks, and used the rest of the proceeds for deficit reduction or something else useful. Food would be cheaper. So would fuel, because demand would be lower and we’d probably have fewer financial speculators, who some experts think are responsible for $25 worth of oil’s march from $64 a barrel a year ago to $119 as Fortune goes to press.

“So in avoiding a gas tax, we have not avoided higher prices. We’ve also done something that should horrify anyone who cares about this country: transferred hundreds of billions of dollars of our wealth to oil-producing countries, many of which don’t exactly share our society’s values of tolerance and freedom. (Can you say Russia? Or Saudi Arabia?)

“Even with gas at $3.50 a gallon, I’d be more than willing to pay a much higher gas tax than I do now because it would knock down demand, cost less in the long run, and demonstrate that the U.S. is willing to do painful things in the present to ensure our future prosperity. Turning biological waste like wood chips into fuel makes a lot of sense. But devoting vast acreage of America’s breadbasket to fuel - about a third of the U.S. corn crop is dedicated to ethanol - is a really terrible idea, as we’re now seeing. Supposedly miraculous and painless cures have a nasty tendency to backfire. Both in scary movies and in the even scarier real world.”

By the way, don’t you just love “cornographic panacea”…?