If you care about poverty, gasoline prices are the least of your worries.

So, the higher gas taxes do give each individual an incentive to switch to a cheaper car. Moving toward less wasteful energy policies is sensible, but it is a major social engineering project. If you care about poverty, gasoline prices are the least of your worries. Instead, we add 2 cents to the tax and it settles to 3. Trying to fix this sort of problem with tax increases tells me we are bankrupt in the sense of being unable to formulate intelligent public policy. Indivudual mobility must be curtailed for the greater good. No! The tax collected has to go toward alternative energies. Well, if there's ever a need for a safety net it's when chainsaw wielding maniacs are after you.

And finally drum roll, please, they're just downright ugly. It's galling to admit that a putz like Gore might have good ideas, but he does. Then we can worry about tax structures and antipoverty programs.

You wanna tax something? Tax 10,000 square foot estates owned by the Hollywood and Manhattan elite. We, poor Murrica, cannot nesc change the gas we need, belive it or not. When she gets nervous about Social Security I get nervous as well. That is, when the price of gas goes up and then goes down a bit, you reduce the price dropoff by adding a few pennies to the tax. Yeah, I am not quite sure what wkwillis was trying to accomplish by recopying the entire comment thread into his comment. My educated guess is that such a tax would increase unemployment. So what to do? Our infrastructure was created to serve the automobile. Ball's example, the rebate does not go down if you as an individual switch to a cheaper car.

The best way to increase the gas tax is by ratcheting. If you need the truck for doing things that cars can't do, point taken.