No the idea of increasing fuel taxes now is to extend the tentacles of control around one more vanishing American freedom. The "predictability" vanishes as soon as another party takes political power.
This writer is worried about "predictability" when the country is going into the severest recession since 1932. There is no more vicious tax on the American economy than the gasoline tax which rips through the economy raising costs everywhere, costing jobs everywhere, prolonging the recession and even extending it into a deep recession or even a depression.
To the contrary, we should be drilling every place there is a prospect of finding something oily. The price of gasoline should be driven down as low through domestic production as possible thus bankrupting our enemies and funding our own economy by building jobs at home and keeping those petrodollars at home. Raising the tax will not bankrupt our enemies -because there is an absolute floor below which we cannot function as a civilization without gasoline- but it will bankrupt our economy.
The transfer from gasoline to non-carbon-based energy will come quite naturally when the technology makes it cheaper. We do not have the economic muscle to waste subsidizing that which is uneconomic.
