It’s obvious why- trucks running on gas bring stuff to consumers.

So prices of food, clothes, toilet paper, compact fluorescent lightbulbs, etc. will all rise too– and the poorer you are, the higher percentage of income you need to spend on these types things.

So isn’t it about more than just the price of gas?

Also, note that people of lower economic status tend to car pool more as well.

Seriously, the idea of a summer tax-free gasoline will only help those who can afford to pay higher gas prices to begin with. McCain’s trickle down theory will disproportionately help the American people.

So let’s say the average product has an embedded energy cost of 10%, of which half is gasoline (which is probably high). Gasoline is now well over three dollars a gallon, and McCain wants to temporarily (for 3 months -1/4 of the year) cut the retail price of gasoline under 10%.

End of the day, we’re cutting the cost of the average product maybe 0.1% at most. Yes, some products have a slightly higher embedded energy cost, but it is hard to see much “trickle down” for this too clever by half and too-cynical by 100% policy.

But I do think that we need to be aware of and have solutions to the natural regressivity of many of our climate solutions. This is a major challenge moving forward. Heading into an election, the climate solution (or D”s) people can’t be the ones advocating increased gas prices.

The best thing we can do for the poor also happens to be what the planet needs: a conversion from taxing the things we WANT from an economy (jobs, income, investment) to taxing the undesired effects of economic activity (consumption of non-renewable resources and emissions of pollutants, particularly toxins). Taxing income and investment is like driving with your foot jamming down on the brake even as your other foot is jamming on the accelerator, but that’s how we operate our tax system.

By taxing primary energy upstream according to its carbon content and then taxing all mineral extractions and pollution permits, the costs are distributed fairly through the economy and the poor — who consume much less and are responsible for much less pollution and waste — pay a lot less in tax, which is shifted onto big consumers. Further, they no longer have to pay payroll taxes (social security), which start with dollar one, and there is no upper cap — the more you consume with your millions, the more tax you pay.

If that is thought to require too much of a burden, then couple it with a Georgist land-value tax — that is, you tax only the land, not the improvements. (The value of land is socially created, so it taxes the value that society creates while encouraging full usage of developed land and discourages speculation.)

Oil prices have been rising so fast since 2000 that any further tax seems pointless. If you want to tax anything, tax domestic fuel to encourage conservation and insulation. In the UK domestic gas and electricity is only taxed at 5% VAT instead of the usual 17.5%, whereas vehicle fuel is taxed at about 300%. From a climate change perspective this is ridiculous.

“Gasoline is now well over three dollars a gallon” That is almost free - I have to pay over $8 a gallon in the UK.

It does make me more than a little irritated to read this US-centric discussion - your per-capita carbon footprint is double that of the UK (and I think we are bad!), and it has risen substantially since Kyoto. You need to slash your fossil fuel consumption by at least half before you can even start to expect the likes of China to look to you for any sort of moral lead.

It is the dark side of libertarian, democratic capitalism that no individual or group of individuals can slow down runaway consumption.

The bottom line is that there is only so much crude oil in the world and it can only be produced at a limited rate, probably never exceeding 100 mbopd max. It will all get burnt as fast as it can be produced. As far as climate change goes it makes no difference who does it.

It cites an estimate of $49 to $100 billion dollars of energy subsidies in 2006. Most of these were for non-renewables. Imagine a world in which those dollars were directed at renewables instead!

Cheney’s friends sure got a high return on investment for their subsidies of the Bush election campaign.

Oil and gas got 52.4%
Coal got 15%
Total fossil was 66.2%
Nuclear got 12.4%
Ethanol got 7.6%
Other renewables got 7.5%
Conservation got 2.1%
Other got 4.2%

How backwards is that! Conservation should have gotten 50%. That would have made a larger difference in all of the others than the money they got.

My concern is for working families at or just below median income. It is clear from your chart that they are the hardest hit by gas taxes. In fact the broad middle class - decile 3 thru 7 is negatively impacted compared to both the poor and the wealthy. You also ignore the basis for judging taxes regressive which is the theory of the diminishing utility of the dollar. A dollar is much more valuable to a person who has 1,000 than to one who has a million.

It’s particularly ironic to hear “they don’t own cars and walk” being given as a reason why the tax isn’t regressive — might they not be doing these things if they weren’t priced out because the costs are already to high relative to their other needs (shelter, food, etc.).

Raising gas taxes is regressive by putting living the way the upper deciles do that much further out of reach for the poorest, and it puts even more of a squeeze on those who may not pay more as an absolute percentage of their income than those who are richer but for whom each dollar is more precious because of their scarcity (those at or just below the median).

Regressive.