Saolving America's gas addiction problem

In our political world, taxing driving by the mile, like going to Iraq to secure a petroleum supply, seems a rational method of addressing America’s oil addiction.

Knowing that every mile adds to the cost, transportation experts who met at the Miller Center last year believe, would cause Americans to address our default position of key in ignition to get anywhere, everywhere and sometimes nowhere. Being forced to recognize our habitual driving would save immense amounts of petroleum and, hence, immense amounts of pollution, congestion and greenhouse emissions while cajoling us toward more “muscle-powered transportation,” thereby decreasing our obesity crisis.

Driving-by-the-mile taxes sound like a brave, new world; a win-win-win world.

But, unfortunately, in practice taxing driving is not a rational scheme. (The United Kingdom tested and discarded the process a few years ago.)

Besides building another bureaucracy with all its potential for inefficiency and corruption, there is no manner of identifying — whether by GPS or odometer — if the driven miles come from single-occupancy usage or whether a half-dozen humans make any car trip immensely more efficient. There is no manner of ensuring that automobile tires are correctly inflated — the simplest way to improve mileage and decrease pollution. Government can’t realistically adjudicate whether any individual trip is an emergency or could be replaced by transit or bicycle.

Our new by-the-mile bureaucracy, furthermore, could never ensure drivers don’t simply unhook odometers/speedometers or leave GPS units in the driveway. In much the same way Fuzzbusters defy radar guns, innovation will find ways to evade whatever method by-the-mile taxes are collected.

Innovation in energy efficiency, however, will slow, because the incentive for seeking higher mileage when buying new cars disappears.

By-the-mile taxation, finally, provides no method of overcoming privacy litigation. The American concept of privacy assures us the right to live our own lives and minimizes Uncle Sam’s influence. Both the left and the right will stampede America’s courtrooms if the federal government devises some method of knowing where every car is at every moment.

As a long-term advocate for rational American gasoline consumption, I wish driving-by-the-mile taxes would work. But our history is clear: Every single time we try some solution besides the economic “first-best” — reasonable auto fuel taxes — we dig ourselves a little deeper into our national state of denial. Here are three examples:

„ The Cash-4-Clunkers program, after all, caused the forced crushing of 690,000 still-usable vehicles and increased used car prices about $1,500, yet its effect on fuel efficiency was less than a mile per gallon.

„ Over its 35-year history, mandated Corporate Average Fuel Economy has increased pollution about 2 percent annually through the paradox that we drive our new vehicles more simply to show off our energy “efficiency.” CAFE meanwhile gave us the SUV, as automakers end-ran the standards by putting car tops on truck chassis because we demanded bigger vehicles.

„ Since grain alcohol can’t be shipped via pipeline and must be trucked from the Midwest to refineries on the coasts, ethanol today barely produces more energy than it burns while decreasing gasoline mileage and spawning world food riots.

With by-the-mile taxing, the transportation experts obviously hope we’ll finally decrease the 2.9 trillion miles we Americans put on odometers annually. They hope we’ll realize that our cars emit 45 percent of the entire world’s automotive carbon dioxide. They hope we’ll recognize that with 2.7 percent of the world’s oil reserves, Americans (4.5 percent of world population) can’t keep using 26 percent of world petroleum production.

And the experts know that rational fuel taxing — which minimizes driving in every other democracy on the planet and has been promoted by Shell, Ford, Nobel-prize economists, renowned energy analysts and foreign policy thinkers — is a non-starter in America’s national state of denial. Hillary Clinton and John McCain, after all, both promised to rebate our meager 18-cent tax in the last election cycle.

But reasonable gasoline prices are the sole proven method of reducing the negative effects of driving worldwide. Europe, Australia and much of Asia tax fuel heavily and then use that income to build mass transit, high-speed trains, bicycle-pedestrian infrastructure and other alternatives to single-occupancy driving. Italy, with the highest fuel taxes in the world, also has the highest-mileage car fleet.

The knee-jerk canard to rational fuel taxing in America is that a gas tax is “regressive” and therefore unfair to the poor, but the data debunks that myth. Black and Hispanic families in America use 11.6 percent less auto fuel than white families, and families headed by men use 30 percent more fuel than families headed by women. The poor nationwide are already faced with pathetic transit service — 82 percent of all transit trips are made by people from families earning less than $50,000 — while the nation subsidizes driving at the rate of $145 billion annually and puts only $40 billion into mass transportation. After the 2009 stimulus worsened that ratio, our “green” president added insult to injury by calling for another $50 billion in roadway improvements.

A realistic gasoline tax would go further toward transportation innovation than per-mile taxing or any government subsidy, which is already costing the treasury billions. Nissan’s all-electric Leaf, for example, can be dumped on the American market for $4,000 less than GM can produce its Volt, because Nissan’s primary sales are in the 123-million “test market” of Japan, where high gasoline taxes ensure that buyers demand fuel efficiency.

Here, however, American taxpayers will subsidize Leaf sales to the tune of $7,500 per vehicle even though we’ll be undercutting our own economy — remember, we taxpayers now own a huge chunk of GM.

Only once we Americans recognize our state of denial can politicians honestly address our national issues and admit, for example, that North Korea was a better target for invasion if the reasons were truly spreading democracy, weapons of mass destruction and a brutal dictatorship.

And that, I think, is what the transportation experts truly want to happen. They hope that per-mile taxing will force us to think about the effects of our irrational driving.

But their solution, building another bureaucracy, is almost as irrational.

The Minerals Management Service, after all, was a brilliant success at preventing oil spills; U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration inspections ensure we have no coal mining disasters, and we can thank the Food and Drug Administration for never allowing salmonella in our eggs and the Consumer Protection Agency for never missing lead-based paint in children’s toys.

Of course, none of these agencies create any part of our $14 trillion debt.

And only last week we learned that $22.3 million in stimulus dollars were sent to 89,000 dead or incarcerated people and the Department of Defense is paying contractors linked to the Taliban to guard military bases in Afghanistan.

 After 20 years teaching media and journalism, Charlottesville-area resident Randy Salzman promotes transportation demand management through his book, “Yes We Can: Getting Americans to Back Away from the Steering Wheel.”