Gas prices are high, and people aren’t happy. President Joe Biden’s administration could make the problem even worse.
That’s because the Biden administration supports establishing a carbon tax of nearly $20 per ton. If enacted without a gasoline exemption, the tax would increase the price of gas by nearly 20 cents per gallon, making the problem even worse. Politically, it would be a bad move for the administration.
People don’t like paying high gas prices and tend to blame the president for them. When George W. Bush was president and gas was $4 per gallon in 2008, he received criticism. He left office with a 34% approval rating, according to Gallup. Most of the country already disapproves of Biden. While his slipping approval started with a tumultuous Afghanistan withdrawal, it has continued as consumer goods, including gasoline, have gotten more expensive under his presidency.
Now, 13 years after Bush, the country faces growing inflation and high gas prices once again. According to AAA, as of Nov. 9, the average price per gallon of regular gas is $3.419 — and rising.
In the western part of the country, $4 per gallon of gas is the norm in many places (or $5 in California). It’s also well over $4 per gallon on islands such as Hawaii, Block Island, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket. Even Massachusetts, where the average gas price is $3.406 per gallon, has gas stations charging $4 per gallon or more for regular gas outside of the islands.
Gasoline is a generally inelastic good. That means that price doesn’t have much influence over demand for gas. Whether gas is $1.50 per gallon or $4 per gallon, people need to get to work, drive their children places, and run errands.
That said, if the Biden administration were to enact a carbon tax, that would raise the cost of gas, and people in suburban areas and rural areas would still have to buy it. Many towns aren’t walkable and lack public transit because of a lack of demand for these things. People drive places, and they can’t stop just because they have to pay twice as much for fuel, if not more.
And a gas tax is a regressive tax. The left-leaning Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center says that gas taxes “tend to hit those with low and moderate incomes the hardest,” compared to the wealthy, who spend a smaller portion of their income on gas. And higher gas prices increase shipping costs, which make consumer goods more expensive.
It’s good that the Biden administration acknowledges that climate change is real and that carbon emissions have an impact on it. However, the solution to combating climate change shouldn’t just be to smack the working class in the face by making it more expensive for them to get to work. While people might not notice some fossil fuels being priced out of the market to encourage people to use renewables, they see the gas prices every time they drive past the station.
The federal gas tax has remained unchanged since 1993 because raising it is a political loser. Even Massachusetts voted to repeal a proposal that indexed the gas tax to inflation at the ballot in 2014.
If Biden wants to reduce the country’s carbon emissions, he should pursue policies that do that. Let’s just hope that a carbon tax isn’t one of them.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts. He is also a freelance writer who has been published in USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other outlets.
