Guaranteeing gas pains.(Correction, Please!)(on increased taxation on gasoline)

ITEM: The New York Times on March 25 editorialized in favor of increased taxation on gasoline and other energy sources, saying: "Higher taxes on energy mean other rich countries are more energy-efficient across the board. The average German or Japanese uses little more than half the energy consumed by an average American.... Americans are beginning to curb consumption. Gasoline demand declined in the first 11 weeks of the year for the first time since 1997. But it is far too little, and government policy is lagging far behind the problem.... A lot more needs to be done to prepare the American economy for a world of scarcer, more expensive energy."

ITEM: One of the nation's "leading energy economists," according to a release from Carnegie Mellon's business school published in Mississippi's Sun Herald for March 27, "believes that fuel costs are actually well below what they should be to reflect actual market value." Professor Lester Lave of the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University maintains that the real cost of a barrel of oil is more than $200. "Lave also believes this truer cost of oil should be communicated to the market with a gasoline tax that raises the price of a gallon of gas to about $7. He says this would help to curb demand, stimulate the economy and break America's dangerous addiction to oil."

"Although he acknowledges such a tax would be unpopular among consumers and elected officials alike, Lave believes it would actually serve as a boon to the U.S. economy, adding nearly $500 billion to federal coffers."

CORRECTION: The professor may be an "intellectual" and his profession may be honorable, but one would have to be completely devoid of common sense or downright duplicitous to contend that dramatically raising taxes on vital energy supplies will be a boon to the U.S. economy. Europeans now pay higher gas prices. Are we supposed to believe that higher gas prices stimulate their economies?

One of the surest ways to get less of something is to tax it. Moreover, with the feds continuously misusing the billions in gas tax dollars they siphon from Americans, why should we compound the error by fueling the government's insatiable appetite?

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Consider some of the all-too-typical projects that have been bankrolled by the federal government through gasoline taxes--monies supposedly reserved for roads. The Tax Foundation compiled such gems as the following from the 2005 Highway Bill: $6 million for graffiti elimination in New York; $2.95 million to Alaska for a film about state roads; $2.2 million to construct a waterfront esplanade at Fort Totten in New York; $8 million for a Harlem Hospital garage; almost $4 million for the National Packard Museum in Warren, Ohio, and the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan; $2.4 million for a Red River National Wildlife Refuge Visitor Center in Louisiana; and $1.2 million to install lighting and steps and to equip an interpretative facility at the Blue Ridge Music Center.