Automakers for Energy Taxes! READ ALL ABOUT IT!
Obviously, a gas tax is a sure way to save the domestic auto industry. The greatest enemy of any industry is uncertainty. Car makers are designing cars for the future. Will that future have gasoline at $2/galoon or $12/gallon? What that price is will determine what kind of cars Detroit should make. It would be a lot easier for Detroit to be designing cars at a stable energy price. A gasoline tax would do just that! With stable energy prices Detroit would know just what kind of car to design.
At the beginning of the decade Ford promised higher mileage cars but the market wouldn’t support this strategy so they stuck with their traditional models and then got really stuck when gas prices went up. The next car Ford designs may be its last. So they need to know what to shoot for.
Auto makers have history of supporting gas taxes. When China established its very strict CAFÉ standards the energy companies asked that they pass a gas tax instead.
In the end whether automakers want a gas tax or not the environmentalist response should be to congratulate them on their corporate wisdom, point out how beneficial it is for them, and encourage them to more openly support gas taxes for everyone’s mutual benefit. Giving them a reason to back gas taxes and forcing them to repudiate them at their peril might be a way to the auto industry to back something that is good for them even if they don’t realize it
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home