Liberal Economics

Here it is, all in just a couple of sentences:

Editor — Here’s an idea for U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein to propose to reduce greenhouse gases (”Feinstein unveils Dem plan to cut greenhouse gas,” Aug. 25). How about a tax credit for individuals who don’t own cars?

How to pay for the credit? With the savings we’d incur by not having to widen existing freeways and building new roads. Everybody wins!

BILL LEVINSON

Oakland

Which boils down to:

1. Gimme, gimme, gimme

2. I don’t have a car, but I need a tax credit

3. You can fake as much savings as you need by guessing at how much you would spend on roads

4. Then you can give the imaginary savings to me as real dollars

So how would this tax credit be determined? By what kind of car you want to have, but don’t? “I really was going to buy a Suburban, so you need to give me the really, really big tax credit. It’s those other guys who would have bought a Corolla, they should get the small tax credit”. Should people be rewarded for imagining a hybrid car as their car? So you would be imaginarily helping the environment by having your pretend car be even better on gas mileage. And your imaginary car would be providing good jobs for Americans at the same time – as long as you imagined an American hybrid. Your pretend Japanese hybrid would only qualify for a full tax credit if it were imagined to be built in the US. And there would be an extra “social” tax credit top-up if your imaginary factory employed imaginary union workers.

Would this be limited to one imaginary car per household? One car per person? There are probably lots of people who would like to have two, three, even four cars but don’t do so. What about children who don’t own cars or would it be limited to those who had drivers licences? What if your licence were suspended, would you still get your tax credit?

What about all those harmless felons in prison? Don’t you think they wouldn’t want to buy a car if only they could? Since they are not consuming gasoline while the government has cruelly restricted their freedom, shouldn’t they get a tax credit too? Consider how much gas all those illegals are not consuming by coming over the border on foot. Shouldn’t they get a credit for doing their part to help the environment? And shouldn’t those who carpool by being sewn into the upholstery of their border crossing vehicles at least get a partial credit?

The whole tax credit business needs to be re-evaluated anyway. There are people who don’t pay any taxes. Should they be snubbed just because they don’t earn any money or choose not to support the global war machine with their income? Not having money might be just one of the reasons that they don’t own a car or two or three. This idea really needs to be supported by a subsidy program where the government just gives out checks to everybody without a car. The exclusions would be anybody who owns an imaginary Hummer or who shops at WalMart.

And can you come up with any better way to invent supposed savings than having politicians estimate how much they have saved by NOT spending money on imaginary roads that they wouldn’t have funded anyway? “Yes, I would have voted 20 gazillion dollars for brand new four lane roads right up to every single voter’s house in the United States. In fact, I would have voted to give a road, a limo, and a driver to everybody in America so let’s build our spending base on that. And we will build in an base-budgeting factor so that an increase in imaginary spending on roads and imaginary savings on not having cars on the imaginary roads will be called a ‘cut’ if the increase is less than the level of inflation plus 10 percent”.

Reason 4324 not to trust liberals with political office. And especially not with money–real or imaginary.