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Raising the Gas Tax after Trying to Cut the Gas Tax
Senator Joe Manchin, in his wisdom, has decided to join the Biden administration and his fellow Democrats in Congress to — wait! what? — raise the gasoline tax.
In an underhanded way, of course.
You will recall that in the early summer, as gasoline prices were skyrocketing, President Joe Biden, the fearful little man in the White House, called for a three-month suspension of the federal sales tax on gasoline. A little somethin’-somethin’ to help out all them pickup-driving Joe Sixpack types out there in the great expansive hydrocarbon-powered boonies — you know, voters. It was a dumb idea on its own, and it was a dumb idea because it was offered as a substitute for the smart idea, i.e., getting Uncle Stupid’s big fat foot off the neck of the U.S. energy industry so that prosperity may emerge organically. It was a quintessentially political proposal, one that would create the impression of doing something and offer a synthetic sense of urgency — the sort of action that is to real policy as stevia is to sugar.
But there was a kind of reflexive economic truth to it: Policies that make gasoline more expensive make gasoline more expensive. And while Democrats do intend to make hydrocarbon energy not only more expensive but prohibitively expensive at some point in time, at that moment the rising price of fuel was politically inconvenient. Climate action can’t wait — except when it can.
But now, under the Joe Manchin–Chuck Schumer climate-folly bill — in which the Democrats propose to decrease inflation by flooding the economy with hundreds of billions of dollars in fresh federal spending, akin to treating diabetes with intravenous injections of Mountain Dew — the gasoline tax is going to go up by billions of dollars a year. The tax Manchin et al. mean to raise is not the one you see imposed at the pump, but the so-called Superfund tax, which lapsed in the 1990s but will be, if Manchin and Schumer have their way, coming back with a vengeance.
The tax is meant to fund federal environmental-mitigation costs at Superfund sites, and it takes the form of an excise on domestic and imported crude oil, as well as on imported petroleum fuels. The original Superfund tax also included a tax on certain chemicals and related “taxable substances,” and that part of the tax already had been revived by the infrastructure bill signed into law in November 2021. The infrastructure bill had the effect of doubling the prior tax rate on the targeted chemicals, as Deloitte figures it.
And there is current progressive environmental policy in miniature: a cheap symbolic I’m-on-your-side gesture to try to buy off the rubes with one hand while sticking the other hand into their deliciously pillageable pockets. The economics of “tax incidence” — meaning the question of where the burden of a tax falls not de jure but de facto — can get pretty complicated, but it is a safe bet that whether the tax is tacked on at the end of the supply chain or upstream, it will put upward pressure on consumer energy prices.
In much the same way that lottery proceeds are notionally intended to benefit politically popular projects such as schools or veterans’ care but end up being dumped into the same revenue hole as everything else, the Superfund tax is, like all taxes, fungible. The marketing material may say that it is being used to clean up environmental-disaster zones, but, as with every other dollar paid in federal taxes, some 80 percent or so of that revenue will go to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other health-care subsidies, national defense, and interest on the debt, which is where almost all federal spending goes.
I am sympathetic to Pigouvian taxes of an environmental character and think there is a pretty good case for a carbon tax to account for the externalities of hydrocarbon consumption. But this is not that — it is nothing nearly so honest. This is simply playing both sides of gas-price politics at the same time, attaching some notional revenue to the climate package to fortify the pretense that it is going to be deficit-neutral while simultaneously burdening the energy industry and setting it up as the scapegoat in case of continued energy-price inflation. You know: “We are trying to make them pay their fair share, and they are unfairly punishing consumers in the service of their bottomless blah blah greed blah blah.”
You can’t blame 100 percent of the price of gasoline on Joe Biden or Joe Manchin. But if the bill becomes law more or less as written, you’ll be able to blame them for an additional 16 cents a gallon or so.
Another Call for the Max TaxWikipedia reports that after the nonrenewal of the Superfund excise, “the burden of the cost was shifted to taxpayers” — as though petroleum and chemical companies were not, you know, massive taxpayers.
Chevron reported in March 2022 that in the past decade it has paid $64 billion in income taxes and another $48 billion in non-income taxes to the several dozen jurisdictions around the world that tax it. That’s not just a ton of money — that’s about a thousand tons of money in stacked-up $100 bills. The notion that these companies are not taxpayers is exceptionally asinine.
I will take this opportunity to renew my call for a maximum tax.
Our lefty friends sometimes push for a high minimum tax, or even for a “maximum income,” an income at which the marginal tax rate would be 100 percent. This is the thinking of Barack Obama, who once said: “At a certain point, you’ve made enough money.” (That’s the kind of thing you say before your $65 million Netflix payday.) I take a different view: that at a certain point, you’ve paid enough tax. People think I’m joking about this, but I’m only half-joking at most: I don’t care how much money you make, once you’ve paid $1 million in income tax, I think that’s enough — forever. I don’t know what Senator Warren thinks is your “fair share,” but if you have handed over $1 million to the Treasury, you have done your part. For businesses, maybe cap total taxes at $1 billion.
We Americans are all good egalitarians, right? I don’t want to hear about how Taxpayer X, who has put billions of dollars into the national budget, hasn’t paid his “fair share” — coming from people who haven’t paid enough taxes to pay for a Honda Civic.
The Max Tax — an idea whose time has come!
And Furthermore . . .
On the eve of the Normandy invasion, the commander of Allied forces, General Dwight Eisenhower, wrote a short speech. It was the speech he didn’t want to give — the statement he would make in case Operation Overlord was a failure.
He made some last-minute edits, in one sentence striking the words “this particular operation” and inserting instead “my decision to attack.” My decision. Contemporary American life has a whole genre of speech dedicated to avoiding statements of personal accountability — “mistakes were made” — but General Eisenhower did not write that way. He wasn’t a brilliant writer like Grant or Jefferson, but he was a clear and direct one, ending his statement: “The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”
Mine alone.
That wasn’t, strictly speaking, true: There were dozens and dozens of variables that were beyond his control, and any number of reasons the invasion might have failed through no fault of the supreme commander. But it was General Eisenhower giving the orders while others executed them — accountability, in his understanding, began at the top.
Can you imagine the speech Supreme Allied Commander Donald J. Trump would have given if he had been the commander at Normandy and the invasion had failed?
Not that Trump would ever find himself in that position. When his country came calling, he showed himself to be a coward and dodged the draft by means of a made-up case of bone spurs that somehow magically cleared up — without treatment — as soon as the danger of service was safely passed. Trump does have the most-interesting doctors.
Still, you can imagine it:
“Our invasion was perfect! People are saying that it was the single greatest military campaign ever conceived, and I am awarding myself the Distinguished Service Cross. People are saying that I should win the Medal of Honor, but Democrats in Congress won’t give it to me — very unfair. SAD! Haters are saying our invasion failed, that we lost — fake news! We won. We won, and it wasn’t even close. I’m thinking about suing them for defamation. I have the world’s greatest military experts saying that our invasion was perfect, that nobody could have done what I did losing only 155,000 troops, which was a terrible thing to watch on Fox News. All the best military analysts say we won: Bill O’Reilly, Ted Nugent, Jon Voight, who was very strong in Pearl Harbor — I mean Pearl Harbor the movie, playing FDR, who has been very unfair to me . . . .”
Trump is still insisting that he won in 2020, because he is too weak and too much of a coward to face the facts: that he wasn’t very good at the job, in the judgment of most of the American people, who set him aside in favor of a dusty can of tuna with hair plugs. He is expected to announce another campaign for the presidency any day now. His plan, if he wins, is personal government. If he loses? We can assume that it will be more of the same: lying and whimpering.
That, and making eyes at men of the sort he would like to be: Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, Mohammed bin Salman.
I’m not supposed to call the Trump boys Uday and Qusay anymore, and, besides, Saddam Hussein is long gone — but Eric Trump has searched all of Arabia and come up with an entirely different murdering anti-American son of a bitch to suck up to, making an appearance at Saudi potentate Mohammed bin Salman’s PR-project golf tournament carrying a golf bag emblazoned with an American flag and the legend: “Trump 2024.” Donald Trump has praised the Saudi initiative, too. Jamal Khashoggi was not a U.S. citizen, but he was a resident of the United States who worked for an American newspaper, and Mohammed bin Salman had him cut up like a fryer chicken. He did that on Trump’s watch, knowing that Trump, who has a weak man’s enrapturement with strongmen, would let it slide. He wasn’t wrong. You’ll recall that super-spy Donald Trump insisted that the CIA had it all wrong.
But voters in that depraved and soul-sick organization called the Republican Party still prefer Trump to such potential competitors as Ron DeSantis, a conservative governor who is, for the most part, pretty good at his job.
I don’t think very much of Harry S. Truman (or, if you insist, Harry S Truman), but I do think highly of “the buck stops here.”
The magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my Country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens, a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with dispondence, one, who, inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpractised in the duties of civil administration, ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies.
That was George Washington’s self-assessment upon taking office as president.
We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us! It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.
That was Abraham Lincoln’s plan to make America great again.
And Donald Trump’s legacy?
“They cheated like hell.”
“Very unfair.”
And not: “The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”
Letters
In some reading over the weekend, I stumbled over the letters “JBS,” written as though everybody would know what was meant. Here is a question: What kind of conservative are you? Do the letters “JBS” make you think of hats, or do they make you think, “Eisenhower is a dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy in the United States”? Or are you the Jay Nordlinger kind, who thinks, “Shouldn’t that be JSB?”
Donziger Update
From Jack Fowler — a reminder that the attempt to extort gazillions of dollars from Chevron on phony environmental grounds was a straight-up racketeering operation undertaken by Steven Donziger, a lefty lawyer and sometime Obama crony, with the assistance of a number of highly connected New York Democrats and progressive celebrities with a financial interest in the scam. National Review and a few others have told the story, but it remains nonetheless an untold story for too many Americans, particularly environmentalists.
Words about Words
I once described Lawrence O’Donnell as “an ass of exceptional asininity.” The joke there is that what asinine literally means is “ass-like,” figuratively “extremely dumb, foolish, ignorant.” The scientific name for a donkey is Equus asinus.
As in:
Et ait in maxilla asini in mandibula pulli asinarum delevi eos et percussi mille viros.
“And he said: With the jawbone of an ass, with the jaw of the colt of asses, I have destroyed them, and have slain a thousand men.”
As anybody who has ever covered a presidential campaign knows good and well, you should never underestimate the power of the jawbone of an ass in motion.
Another word of interest, a much more obscure one: nogging.
I spent the weekend with some architects and engineers and builder types, and one of them mentioned that in Colonial-era houses in New England, some of the windows on the upper floors of houses have a sturdy layer of brick directly beneath the window opening — the idea being to protect a shooter firing a musket from the window from return fire, making the windows function something like the crenels (or embrasures) on castles’ battlements. The use of bricks in such a way is called nogging, a general term for brick in-fill between timbers or framing. If you have seen old Tudor-style houses with exposed half-timbers on the exterior filled in with brick, that brick is nogging. Sometimes nogging is visible, and sometimes it is covert.
What is interesting is that bricks used to fill in wooden beams are nogging, but nogging also means wooden blocks used to fill in brick structures — i.e., nogging is one of those words that means two approximately opposite things: brick-filled wood and wood-filled brick. Brick-sized wooden blocks, or nogs, were inserted into brick walls to allow cladding to be nailed up over those walls — the wooden block gave the nails something to be nailed into.
The origin of the word nog is unknown — it seems to refer to wooden pegs at the earliest point in its career. It also refers to a kind of strong ale, giving rise to the modern English drink name “egg-nog.” A nog is a peg, and a nog is a drink, and, as anybody who likes his liquor straight knows, a peg is still a drink in colloquial English, as in “Pour me a peg of that whiskey.”
Whether and how nog as peg or block and nog as kind of alcoholic drink are related is unknown.
But, if you happen to notice a bricklayer working on a Tudor-style house, feel free to compliment him on his nogging, and maybe invite him out for a peg after the work is done. Builders are interesting people — they know things.
Rampant Prescriptivism
Most stylebooks recommend “Harry S. Truman” with the period, even though the “S” didn’t stand for anything and hence is not an abbreviation and hencely hence requires no period — but he usually wrote his name with the period, and it is a good practice, usually, to write people’s names the way they write them. Except for Prince during his symbol phase.
That being said, the soft drink favored by Texans is Dr Pepper, no period.
Math Prescriptivism
A reader who thinks I am stupid points out that I made an obvious mistake by writing that the U.S. labor-force participation rate had declined “from 67 percent to 62 percent, a decline of about 7 percent.” No, dummy, it’s 5 percent!
But no, it isn’t: 62 is about 93 percent of 67, and if you reduce 67 by 7 percent, you end up at 62. When you are dealing with changes in percentages, the magnitude of the change is not the same as the number of percentage points in the change. For example, if you have a Covid-infection rate of 50 percent that gets cut to 25 percent, you haven’t cut the rate by 25 percent — you have cut the rate by half, or by 50 percent, which, in this case, means by 25 points. So if the unemployment rate goes down one point, from 5 percent to 4 percent, that is a reduction of one-fifth, or 20 percent, not a reduction of 1 percent.
Getting the arithmetic right doesn’t do you any good if you are confused about what it is you are trying to quantify.
Send your language questions to TheTuesday@NationalReview.Com
Home and Away
You can buy my most recent book, Big White Ghetto: Dead Broke, Stone-Cold Stupid, and High on Rage in the Dank Woolly Wilds of the ‘Real America,’ here.
My National Review archive can be found here.
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Recommended
The Wall Street Journal calls bullsh** on Schumer-Manchin tax claims.
A very interesting book on the politics of the 1930s and 1940s is Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time by Ira Katznelson. The chapter on the New Deal Democrats’ Jim Crow Congress is illuminating.
I recently had need to revisit Jay Nordlinger’s Children of Monsters, a very interesting book about the sons and daughters of men such as Mussolini and Stalin. (And Hitler? Maybe.) If you haven’t read it, you should. A phrase from it stuck with me, a description of one of Mussolini’s allies as “Fascista nato e vissuto” – “a fascist by birth and by life.” I have a terrible feeling that I am going to have use for that phrase for a very long time.
From the New Criterion: “Joyce in voice: the Ulysses century” by Dominic Green. “On the many interpretations of Ulysses.”
In Closing
Speaking of big events from the 1930s — happy birthday to my father, Joe Williamson, who is, like Dwight Eisenhower, a son of Denison, Texas, and who has seen some changes since coming into this world in 1938.
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