Miscellaneous readings of late:
Jack up the gas tax! For decades I’ve been pushing for radically higher gas taxes, at the pump, as well as carbon taxes & such. This little article earned me many enemies among good liberals*, and my public testimony against Mayor Pave’s dirty air budget earned me threats of violence from rightists like Vicki Pyzinski (a.k.a. Vicki McKenna) . And now, finally, years later, it looks like the big brains at Harvard have finally figured out that higher carbon taxes are the only way to get ourselves off of that filthy addiction.
*Whenever a gas tax gets talked about, good middle class liberals wail about “the poor! What about THE POOR?!” What they really mean is, what about their own ability to wastefully deathmobile everywhere. The poor don’t drive much to begin with — about 1/10 as much as a typical middle class suburbanite — and furthermore, there are ways to recycle carbon/fuel taxes on machines back to people through lower income taxes (or higher EITC). If done progressively, this could end up putting more money back into the hands of the poor than any other mechanism out there.