From: p00004@psilink.com (Michael Smith)
Newsgroups: alt.politics.greens,ba.transportation,sci.environment
Subject: Re: Gas Tax?
Date: 27 Jan 93 00:14:18 GMT
Organization: Performance Systems Int'l
X-Mailer: PSILink-DOS (3.3)

My public-access system has been on the fritz for a couple of days; I 
tried to post this response before but I don't think it got through. If 
I'm mistaken, and anybody gets this more than once, I apologize.


>DATE:   Fri, 22 Jan 1993 21:41:21 GMT
>FROM:   Dean Alaska <dean@vexcel.com>
>
>In article <2936816145.1.p00004@psilink.com> p00004@psilink.com (Michael Smith) writes:
>>
>>So the only real solution seems to me a policy mix that re-concentrates 
>>workplaces and at least a good chunk of residences in ways that can be 
>>well served by transit. 

>>The regressiveness 
>>of a [gas] tax at [European]
>> levels could easily be mitigated by some tax relief at 
>>the low end in the income-tax mechanisms.

>I think this points to the difference between short term and long term
>policy.  [....] we have a lot of cities and we need to try to make then
>work.  Policies to change the forces that created them, but can we
>move away from the automobile society without redesigning cities?
>The suggestion about the lifeline or baseline gas rates is an
>ineresting suggestion but it needs further development.  Would it
>be need-based?  At what level?  Is it regionally based?  Just how
>burdensome would the beauracracy be?

(I)
Every little bit helps, of course. Every car trip not taken goes on the plus 
side of the ledger. So short-term palliative measures that at least hold 
car use steady or even slightly reduce it are very welcome.

But I think the real answer to your first question is "no". On the other 
hand, redesigning cities is really quite easy, using rather unobtrusive 
mechanisms. The arrangement we have now, as everybody but a few 
right-wing crackpots seems to be aware, is a product of policy -- one 
might even say, of social engineering, to be a bit more pointed about 
it. It started some time ago -- roughly, the Twenties in the US -- but 
really only got up to speed in the years right after World War II, and 
was essentially complete about a quarter-century later.

What policy did, policy can undo. People don't need to be frog-marched 
out of their suburbs and steel coffins, any more than they needed to be 
frog-marched into them; all that's needed is to structure 
the incentives differently.

Of course, the real obstacle to this is not the ideological virginity of 
free-market cultists, but the very powerful vested interests who imposed 
the policy we have, and who appreciate to the hilt the ability of Gummint 
to line their pockets. Real social forces, in other words, not the 
autodidact's chimaeras of Randism, or whatever. I'm thinking, of course, of 
real-estate speculators, construction interests (including, of course, 
important elements of the informal economy, a.k.a. organized crime), 
and the car industry and its satellites. 

On the other hand, the dispersal trend may well have reached some 
kind of limiting point -- aren't two-hour 
commutes far from uncommon now? -- and so perhaps some of these clever 
people will think of a way to make money on the reflux. 

(II)
On the matter of "baseline gas rates", that isn't quite what I had in 
mind. What would be better, I think, would be a straightforward gas tax, 
applied to all purchases (even "baseline" purchases by poor people), but 
an offsetting tax relief in the low brackets, so that poor people 
initially wouldn't be paying any more overall in taxes, and could end up 
paying less if they used their cars less. The idea is to preserve the 
incentive to migrate away from car use, even for the poor, without 
making their lives any harder than they already are.

I don't think this would require *any* extra bureaucracy -- we already 
have a gas tax and an income tax. One might, possibly, want to make the 
gas tax rates higher in urbanized areas than in rural ones (where cars 
of some kind really do make sense); but again, surely one wants to keep 
an incentive to migrate to less wasteful cars, even for the country 
cousins. 

--Michael Smith