Editorial Gaseous fumes
Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien
Gaseous fumes The jockeying in Washington over lowering the 1993 surtax on transportation fuel has been a high-octane exercise in election-year politics. If there had been a tax on rhetoric, the...
...But if Republicans appealed to short-term election gimmicks (the repeal was scheduled to last only until January), Democrats failed to make an argument either for tax policy in general or for a needed fuel levy...
...last year the average was down to 19.3, the result of a market shift away from smaller vehicles to larger gas guzzlers...
...Their lack of resolve may cost the country more in the long run...
...With the demise of the 55-miles-an-hour speed limit, fuel efficiency will continue to plummet (it takes 50 percent more fuel to go 75 miles per hour than 55...
...The 4.3 cent per-gallon gas tax levied in 1993 had a laudable goal: deficit reduction...
...vehicles averaged 20.2 miles per gallon...
...Still, even a more direct rationale might not have salvaged the 1993 tax, given this election-year's volatile combination of antitax sentiment and rising fuel costs...
...For oil production in the U.S...
...Clearly, the culprit of the price increase was not the 1993 tax (even including the 4.3-cent levy, the U.S...
...has the lowest gasoline taxes in the world, averaging 34 cents per gallon, compared to $3.22 in some European countries), but something closer to home: supply and demand...
...And whereas we imported 3.2 million barrels a day in 1985, that figure has now jumped to 6.9 million barrels, nearly equal to our total domestic production...
...Instead, Washington has so far given us only hot air and indirection...
...The latter ballooned because Americans are driving more and using less energy-efficient vehicles...
...Arguably, however, the aim of a gasoline tax ought to have been more closely linked to national transportation needs and repair of the environmental damage involved in meeting those needs, rather than to replenishing the general fund...
...Last year, for example, we averaged 7,900 miles per vehicle, compared to 5,350 in 1973...
...have remained relatively stable for the past decade, but shot up when supply dropped following a cold winter, the introduction of new storage and production practices, and heightened demand...
...The political pandering, however, was noxious...
...If there had been a tax on rhetoric, the treasury coffers would have run over...
...Taxation is traditionally one of the most efficient means to curtail the use of a limited resource...
...Fuel prices in the U.S...
...Thus, the need to conserve is imperative, certainly for ecological reasons, but also for economic and geopolitical ones...
...And fuel efficiency-which had increased dramatically in the 1970s and '80s-has now reversed itself: In 1985, U.S...
...But the task of leadership is to point out unwelcome eventualities and thus to engineer a change in course...
...To make such an argument for a fuel tax would have taken raw political courage, a scarce commodity in an election year...
...Republicans sought to lift the tax only after prices had already spiked at 20 cents a gallon...
...peaked at 9 million barrels a day in 1985 and has now slipped to 7 million...
...Instead, an opportunity was lost to examine not only tax policy but the vital transportation and environmental needs of the nation...
...Since domestic production relative to need will continue to fall (we have 2.6 percent of known world oil reserves compared to 66 percent in the Middle East), America can count on future shortages and erratic price fluctuations...
Vol. 123 • June 1996 • No. 11
