Saturday, December 06, 2008

Gas taxes

Today I passed a gas station charging $1.799/gallon.

That is amazingly cheap compared to what we're used to -- my maximum was $4.339/gal, on 6/17/08.

So now is the absolute best time to implement a $1/gal gas tax.

Obama should do it on Day 2.

Gasoline demand in the US is at 8.6 gal/person/week. A $1/gal tax would thus raise about $130B/yr -- and gas at the pump would still be $2.80/gal, a dream compared to last summer. Every dime of this revenue should go into R&D for alternative technologies.

Imagine what we could do with $130B. The Apollo project cost about $25B total. That's about $160B in today's dollars.

This has always been true of America: put lots of really smart people in a room, and they will figure out just about anything.

Let's get started.

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