How have past fuel tax efforts fared in the U.S.?
Poorly. The idea of taxing energy to reflect its true costs runs smack against both Americans’ traditional sense of entitlement to cheap energy and the anti-tax ideology of the past quarter-century. This cheap-energy entitlement helped kill the last two big efforts to tax energy – President Clinton’s Btu tax in 1993 and Rep. John Anderson’s “50/50” program in the 1980 elections – which helps explain why no prominent elected official has yet endorsed raising taxes on energy. Progressive tax-shifting or a rebate of carbon tax revenues should dramatically reduce resistance to the idea of a tax and, as described in the response to the next FAQ, polls demonstrate significant support for a tax designed to reduce global warming.
