Liberal Talk Radio

I’m not really all that interested in tax credits for hybrids, mostly because, at the end of the day, they just incentivize driving. Car-centric urban development is the real boogey man here. The suburbs make you and your fat ass die in a car crash, and all the hybrid tax credits in the world ain’t gonna change that.

This is one of those times when tax credits are silly policy. Because we don’t necessarily want to subsidize long commutes. What we want to do is cut down on oil use, because oil dependence causes all sorts of bad things, like global warming and war. The fact is, that as long as we live lives that require massive amounts of energy just to move our asses from work to school to home to the grocery store, we’re going to be dependent on some sort of energy source, and it’s likely to have adverse consequences in some manner or other.

This is all by way of saying that I think the real solution is a $1/gallon gas tax, phased in over, say, 5 years. Because people have to know it’s coming, so they have a chance to buy different cars and choose different jobs and houses that are closer together. If you do it gradually you won’t hurt the economy, either, because if there’s one thing the business world knows how to deal with, it’s predictability. If they can plan for it, they’ll figure out how to work around it.

There’s a metaphor here about the frog and the boiling water, but I won’t repeat it because I recently read that it’s not actually true.