Matthew Yglesias Throws his Support to The New Gas Tax.. Also In Breaking News: Water is Wet

Because a liberal never saw a tax he didn't like.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer, Democrat of Oregon—who represents the Portland area and is best known as Capitol Hill’s leading bicycling advocate—wants to change that. Last week, he introduced a bill to phase-in a 15-cent hike in the gas tax, followed by an indexing of the tax to inflation. 

The idea is a total nonstarter in Congress and politically toxic to boot. Even bothering to discuss it is somewhere between pointless and insane. It’s manna from heaven for Republicans who've been on the defensive over taxing the rich and would love to shift the conversation to Blumenauer’s plot to make the middle class pay more at the pump.

Because you know, you have to pay more to the government. Cause they need it. Cause poor people and stuff. Every single dime we are already paying is efficiently spent and accounted for.

The knee-jerk defense of more money to the government is so woefully ingrained to yahoos like Yglesias, it never occurs to them that money should be for some sort of purpose. But when you and I spend money, it's to achieve a purpose. Matt sees it as a way to control behavior. Never mind silly outdated notions like freedom to choose. That's only for abortions.

Gasoline, you see, is very useful as a fuel for automobiles, but it also causes quite a bit of pollution when you burn it. Some of this, of course, is the carbon dioxide pollution that contributes to the greenhouse effect and the global threat of climate change. But a lot of it relates to other kinds of dirty particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide, and ozone that lead to drastically higher rates of asthma for kids who grow up near highways, for example. Burning gasoline by driving your car also imposes nonecological external costs. Bored kids cruising around in circles just to get out of the house and people taking extra trips to the grocery store rather than planning in advance take up space on the road, thus slowing everyone else down. And every additional vehicle-mile driven increases the chances that you’ll collide with somebody else, killing or injuring him. 

See you need him to look out for you. Otherwise you'll just be polluting the earth, letting your kids do what kids have been doing for the last 80 years or so, going to the store, and just basically living your life but not the way he would like. If you would start conserving, we could get rid of those gauche stores like WalMart. But he's smart. He knows what's going on. Let's bask in his intelligence:

But any time you tax anything, some of the real cost is borne by producers, who sell less stuff now that the price is higher. Except nobody really produces oil—it’s just sitting around in the ground.

This may be the two most stupid sentences ever put to paper. People, whether or not gas prices go up or down, I and everyone else still have to drive the same amount of miles to work, we still have to go to the store, we still have to do our day to day stuff. Sure we might postpone a road trip or make different choices to save on gas. But then I am not able to do as much and those stores I would shop at now get less business. Anything they sell costs more anyway because gas prices figure into producing anything, especially with shipping. You have to get the product from point a to point b somehow. All of this decreases economic activity and hurts the poor, not the producers. They are still selling. If they do have to sell less, they get rid of workers and cap wells. Nice Matt.

Oh you know what Matt? Every product created is made from materials sitting in the ground. There has to be some sort of refinement process to create milk, shoes, Ipads, and yes.. even Oil and Gas. No oil goes from a hose in the ground directly to your car. So the stupidity of that sentence trumps the previous one.

Feel free to read the rest of this idiocy if you like. Matty is a typical religious zealot, it's just his religion isn't Christianity. It's big government. I hope he's the first one picked when the Hunger Games inevitably starts.