Massachusetts to consider carbon tax on gasoline, diesel fuel

of using the stuff as opposed to horse and buggy.

If you believe that the economic harm and resulting lowering of the standard of living that comes from increasing the price of transportation (and food, and clothing, and medical care, and everything else) is outweighed by the economic good of lower emissions from transportation, then just say so. Then prove that your economic models of both the hard and the good of lower vs higher emissions and lower vs higher cost of living are worth believing.

Instead it's just hysterical screaming about killing the planet and oblique Jonathan Gruber-style triangulations to get the people to sign on to your policy proposals without being in a position to directly notice the costs to them.

Believe it or not, I'm actually an AGW agnostic, not a skeptic. But the way the true believers behave, that's what makes me leary of even agreeing with your people that the sky is blue.

This state's legislature treats the gas tax like an electrified third rail. They refuse to do what's necessary to keep it at a level that's actually functionally useful for paying for all the costs of gas consumption. They won't increase it for anything even as our mass transit system falls apart.

somebody's cousins.

Repeat after me: the MBTA isn't strapped for cash. It has an excess of incompetent people entrenched in middle management. Maybe not a majority, but enough to matter.

How do I know this? To be honest, I don't know, I only infer from context. The context is that after the winter of 2015, the small number of people at the top completely turned over but the larger number of people in the middle who in any organization bear the brunt of responsibility for day-to-day operations stayed right in place.

How do I know that? Because if there had been the kind of massive firings that that clusterfuck merited, and the continued clusterfucks of broken down subway cars and track fires and switching equipment that no one seems to quite know how it works, continue to merit, then the howling would have been heard on the moon.

I heard no howling, and I still see buses bunched up on Mass Ave, so I infer that no such firings for incompetence have taken place.

applies to that million dollar shack by the Red Line and the million dollar 500 sq foot apartment with no parking space and garbage dumpster view in Beacon Hill as much as it applies to the million dollar house out of earshot of your neighbors fucking loudly and out of smellshot of your other neighbors smoking pot profusely.

The other thing about the mortgage interest deduction is that lefties were all up in arms about it being cut back to only cover the first 3/4 of a million as of last year. That was supposed to have been heartless and punitive and orange man bad and all. So which is it?

he either doesn’t actually care about the environment or doesn’t actually care about low-income people. If he cared about both, he would indeed think beyond first order effects. Likely he is pitting one against the other because he thinks it’s a brilliant strategy that no one can see through.

Yes, they don't need to get rid of the car completely, they just need to drive about half as much with a much smaller, more fuel efficient car. Similarly, not all jobs need to be in the city, but if we're actually going to get a lot of people to stop driving, a lot of jobs need to relocate to the city.

If $2 a month ends up being $10 a week.