Soccer Dad

Krauthammer's price point

Charles Krauthammer writes in At $4 everyone gets rational.

At $4 a gallon, the fleet composition is changing spontaneously and overnight, not over the 13 years mandated by Congress. (Even Stalin had the modesty to restrict himself to five-year plans.) Just Tuesday, GM announced that it would shutter four SUV and truck plants, add a third shift to its compact and midsize sedan plants in Ohio and Michigan, and green-light for 2010 the Chevy Volt, an electric hybrid.

Some things, like renal physiology, are difficult. Some things, like Arab-Israeli peace, are impossible. And some things are preternaturally simple. You want more fuel-efficient cars? Don't regulate. Don't mandate. Don't scold. Don't appeal to the better angels of our nature. Do one thing: Hike the cost of gas until you find the price point.

Now I can't say I'm necessarily in favor of higher taxes on gasoline, but at least he has one saving grace that he doesn't express himself in quite the obnoxious way that Thomas Friedman did.
Still Krauthammer seems a little smug here:

This is insanity. For 25 years and with utter futility (starting with "The Oil-Bust Panic," the New Republic, February 1983), I have been advocating the cure: a U.S. energy tax as a way to curtail consumption and keep the money at home. On this page in May 2004 (and again in November 2005), I called for "the government -- through a tax -- to establish a new floor for gasoline," by fully taxing any drop in price below a certain benchmark. The point was to suppress demand and to keep the savings (from any subsequent world price drop) at home in the U.S. Treasury rather than going abroad. At the time, oil was $41 a barrel. It is now $123.

One year he proposed a gas tax to abolish affirmative action. With the windfall from his gas tax, Krauthammer proposed a fund be set up for reparations for slavery and after a one time payment was made, all affirmative action would be scrapped.

With gas prices low, such a tax seemed oppressive. Now it seems sensible.

My guess is that Don Surber would still object.