There were a lot of loser questions asked at the Democratic debate last night by Tim Russert (like, "What if we had al-Qaeda's No. 3 guy and it just so happened that he knew a bomb was about to go off in the next 2 days, and also there was a solar eclipse and it was February 29 of a leap year, would you sanction a pulling off of the fingernails...."), but one that I thought deserved some digging into was this one:
Do you support a $3.00 per gallon gasoline tax?
Wait a minute, I said. The Republicans are already charging you a hefty gasoline tax. It's called the Iraq War. Not to mention the expense of keeping military operations going in the Middle East. And if you want to get right down to it, do you think there would have been a 9/11 if we didn't have a military presence in the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia? How do you even put a cost on a tragedy like that?
So I thought I'd dig into it and find out how much of a "gas tax" we are effectively paying already.
Fortunately I found that someone has done just this type of analysis: you can read the National Defense Council Foundation report from January for yourself. Go to the page and click on "The Hidden Cost of Oil: an Update".
Let me give you the highlights. The hidden costs of oil importation are categorized like this:
- The Cost of Oil-Related Defense Expenditures. Adding the fixed costs for defending Persian Gulf Oil and Iraq War expenditures together, they get an annual figure of $137.8 billion.
- The Loss Current Economic Activity Due to Capital Outflow. As of 2006, this had risen to $117.4 billion.
- The Loss of Domestic Investment. In 2006, $394.2 billion.
- The Loss of Government Revenues. In 2006, $42.9 billion.
- The Cost of Periodic Oil Supply Disruptions. In 2003, NDCF estimated the cumulative economic impact of the oil supply disruptions of the past three decades (1973, 1979 and 1990) at between $2.3 trillion and $2.5 trillion.
The report sums up the damage (and this doesn't count 9/11 at all):
Because the effects of oil supply disruptions extend beyond the actual event, it was determined that the aggregate cost should be amortized over a 30-year time frame. At the upper limit, this resulted in an annual cost of $82.5 billion, bringing the 2003 estimate of the total of all costs associated with oil supply disruptions to $304.9 billion. When adjusted for the higher cost of imports in 2006, the estimate of amortized costs of supply disruptions increased to $132.8 billion annually for a total of all oil-related external or “hidden” costs of $825.1 billion per year. This total is nearly twice the figure authorized for [spending by] the Department of Defense in 2006. To put the figure in further perspective, it is equivalent to adding $8.35 to the price of a gallon of gasoline refined from Persian Gulf oil.
So, candidates ... are you for a $3.00 gas tax? Well, it certainly kicks the crap out of the $8.35 tax we're paying right now. What this means is that ethanol, hydrogen, biofuels, or whatever could cost $10.00 a gas-gallon equivalent, and we'd be ahead of the game already. But of course, a lot of well-connected people have a boatload of interest in seeing to it that this is not allowed to happen.
But the candidates weren't asked much about the causative issues of how we got into the various messes we are in right now. It was more like, "Hey Democrats, you're big taxers. How about a gas tax? You'd just love THAT, wouldn't ya? Huh? HUH??"
My main beef last night was that the questions were all these top-end band-aid kinds of things, like imposing taxes and torturing people, rather than even attempting to get at the core problems behind all of this stuff. Better questions might have been, "What is your vision for a more energy-independent America? What would you do as President to make it a reality?" Or "The Bush administration has received criticism from everyone on this stage about its handling of terrorism prevention. What would you do differently, and why?" If it has to be a 3-minute answer, rather than fit into the little 30-second "lightning round" garbage they had going last night, that's really OK. Listening to a slightly lengthier answer about something of substance rather than a quickie answer to a manufacturedly provocative question will not disrupt our Frito-eating or our couch reclining. We can handle it.