Global Warming Rates Higher On List Of Liberal Priorities Than Helping The Poor
...it’s very interesting to observe the contradictions among liberals between their desire for progressive taxation and their advocacy for higher gasoline taxes. Demand for gasoline, in economics jargon, is inelastic, meaning that a change in price is not rapidly followed by a change in demand. In other words, the working mother who has to commute 10 miles to work each day cannot in short order switch to a job closer to home or buy a Prius, and so she is forced simply to pay the higher prices and reduce spending in other parts of her budget.
Normally, this is exactly the kind of scenario that would register significant rumblings on liberals’ economic seismographs, which are finely tuned to detect injustice: gas taxes are a classic example of regressive taxation, in which the tax burden falls disproportionately on the poor.
Read the whole thing.
Personally, I reject the idea that taxation should be used to manipulate human behavior at all. Because when we approve of such taxation we stipulate that the government knows better than we individual citizens.
Which I’m pretty sure isn’t in keeping with all that “we the people” and “the consent of the governed” stuff the founders were talking about.
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