Dave Fried talks about the supposedly regressive nature of gas taxes in response to Andrew Sullivan, and uses my blog to make a point about public transportation, but he’s barking up the wrong tree.
The supposed regressive nature of the gas tax is a fallacy – in fact, poor people spend far less proportionally on gasoline than do the upper-middle-class.
The gas tax isn’t purely progressive; though; the very rich actually spend less proportionally than do the upper-middle-class, due to their tendency to be either in the few healthy downtowns, or less need to drive overall.
Poor people as a rule simply DON’T drive as much as you middle-class people think. The people you think are poor who you see driving everywhere are actually the lower rungs of the middle-class; and they’re doing it in much more fuel-efficient vehicles than their upper-middle-class SUV-drivin’ non-neighbors. Even the poor people who own cars (and most do, around here) often leave them parked during the day. Drive around East Austin at 10:00 on a weekday and you see a lot of driveways with older Japanese cars parked in them (with a few 80s-vintage American cars which still get much better mileage than do SUVs). Now drive around Great Hills and see how many cars you see parked which aren’t for stay-at-home moms.
Poor people, in every metropolitan area with which I have a passing familiarity, are also concentrated in urban areas or the oldest (inner-ring) suburbs. (Don’t bother me with anecdotes about the rural poor; we’re talking macro scale here). Guess what that does to the number of miles they must drive?
Ride the bus sometime if you want to see real poor people. Trust me on this one.
The other problem with this analysis is that it ignores other sources of roadway funding, such as property and sales taxes, which in this state are a huge portion of revenues for roads (even state highways). Due to the fact that poor people here live in areas which still proportionately get taxed at a higher rate than due the exurbs, they’re ALREADY being taxed regressively. The gas tax evens it out a bit, in fact.
Some supporting articles (note: links changed to web archive in 2020 as the originals have turned into 404s):
- New Jersey analysis including link to MIT study
- A dozen reasons for raising the gas tax (See reason 11)
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