Lileks on that coastal elite, nanny-statist Andrew Sullivan in today’s Bleat:
Okay.
As you may know, Andrew Sullivan has famously proposed hiking gas prices by a dollar to reduce the deficit and pay for the Iraq campaign. Don’t get me wrong – I have a great deal of respect for Andrew.But.
Here I disagree. Low gas prices are bad for the economy and bad for drivers, he says – the sort of statement that makes you read everything that follows with wry detached amusement, the same way you’d regard an article on canine training that began “dogs respond remarkably well to feng shui.” You read on because it can only get better.
He refers to gas as “woefully undertaxed.” If one uses the phrase “woefully undertaxed” one may be correct, but one should not be surprised when one’s conservative bona fides are called into question. You could make the argument that cable TV is woefully undertaxed. Peanut butter is woefully undertaxed. Once
you’ve identified a good that can be cured by additional taxation, well, everything is woefully undertaxed. There aren’t any pro-war movies being made! We could fund them with a movie tax! Popcornn is woefully undertaxed! He says:The truly needy tend to consume less gas than their middle-class compatriots. Others say it penalizes those in remote and rural areas. So what?
Some conservatives say it’s antithetical to the American Dream. Hooey.
Lileks must have made it further into the piece than I did to discover Sullivan’s contention that it’s okay to disproprotionatlely tax the people in the heartland (that is, everyone between the Rockies and the Appalachians) because we don’t matter.
Bollucks on Sullivan, again.
