Appearing in today’s N&R, Thomas Friedman marvels at the way Denmark broke its addiction to oil.
But I knew there was a catch:
“I have observed that in all other countries, including in America, people are complaining about how prices of [gasoline] are going up,” Denmark’s prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, told me. “The cure is not to reduce the price, but, on the contrary, to raise it even higher to break our addiction to oil. We are going to introduce a new tax reform in the direction of even higher taxation on energy and the revenue generated on that will be used to cut taxes on personal income — so we will improve incentives to work and improve incentives to save energy and develop renewable energy.”
So what good is a tax cut on personal income if you’re paying more for energy? That’s the mentality that organizations like PART push when they say they’re saving citizens gas money by providing bus service funded through state and federal grants and, yes, car-rental taxes.
On that subject, I took note of a Carolina Journal (unposted) editorial that addressed using car-rental taxes to fund mass transit. Fair enough, the editorial says there are worse ways for the Triangle Transit Authority to spend millions in car-rental tax revenue than investing in new buses and vans because they, as opposed light rail, have “immediate, practical uses and won’t lose most of their value in the furture if economic conditions change.”
But the editorial also has the big picture in sight:
The best idea would have been to repeal the car-rental tax altogether. It never made sense to force rental-car consumers — not just visitors but also local businesses and people awaiting car repairs — to finance a disproportionate share of local transit development.
They obviously don’t see it that way in Davie County.
