Two Things I Alone Think Should Be More Expensive

Perhaps I am committing political suicide by posting such an unpopular
statement, but here goes: I think gas should be more expensive and
that property taxes should be higher. There, I said it. There goes
my future political aspirations.

Let me explain why such statements. But let me first explain my take
on why people are so fervently thinking the opposite. On gas, we've
grown accustomed to it being cheap, thanks to 25+ years of deal-making
between the Bush family and the Saudis (a deal that Clinton was more
than happy to keep going). Well, what's the matter with cheap gas,
you say? All manner of negative externalities that don't get built
into the price of gas, which lead to way more gas being consumed than
is good for us. Negative externalities everywhere you look, from
environmental (pollution, the consumption of a scarce resource) to
social (congestion, the isolating effect of driving vs. riding public
transit) or political (unhealthy reliance on a scarce commodity that
is mostly found in volatile countries).

Rising gas prices really get our dander because their prices are
posted on big colorful signs along our roads, and because every week,
we have to sit there at the pump and watch those numbers turn. Don't
think that if any other item we bought regularly was treated in thise
way that we wouldn't get pissed off that it's price was going up, too.

So it's partly the way we see gas prices that causes us to get mad
when they go up. Same story with property taxes. Early every year,
when we're still hung over from our holiday spending sprees, we get a
huge bill from our municipalities. Most of us have spread our auto
and home insurance over twelve months, so there's less sticker shock
there. Not so with property tax. Even worse, it's easy to wonder
what we're getting for all that money. Some of us don't have
school-age children, which is where most of that money goes, so it's
like we're paying something for nothing. Some of us do have
school-age children, which makes us even madder because we think that
for all we're paying, we ought to be getting more for our kids.

But property tax is, most public financiers would agree, the best kind
of tax. Because most property can't move, it leads to the least
amount of bad maneuvering (I say bad maneuvering because of course
oftentimes taxes are used to stimulate good maneuvering -- doing less
of something that gets taxed more or doing more of something that gets
taxed less). It's a fairly progressive tax, even moreso than the
income tax, because if you have enough wealth to own property, you
ought to be taxed more than if you don't. If anything, property tax
should be higher, either to raise more funds for schools or to lower
the rates on taxes that aren't nearly as progressive or as immune from
funky maneuvering. You could make a case that, as with gas, property
taxes being too low leads people to "consume" more of it than they
need to, leading to excessive decentralization as people gobble up
larger and larger parcels further away from our important urban
centers.

In my opinion, gas and property taxes aren't too high, they're too
low. And keeping them too low creates all sorts of problems. And yet
the general public is rabidly demanding relief, and in a swing
election year, politicians are bending over backwards to offer it. It
would be funny to observe how entitled we are about these two things,
except that it's not funny at all. It's preventing us from
considering how much better off we'd be -- all of us -- if we'd
realize these two things are actually under-priced, and worked towards
getting the price right.