Recent Streetsblog USA posts about Gas Prices

The Assumption of Inconvenience

By Ryan Avent | Sep 30, 2009 | 5 Comments

Early this week, I noticed a number of my favorite bloggers linking to this Elisabeth Rosenthal essay at Environment 360, on the mysterious greenness of European nations. The average American, as it happens, produces about twice as much carbon dioxide each year as your typical resident of Western Europe. Rosenthal attributes much of this difference […]

Would Real Men Tax Gas? A Test for Tom Friedman

By Ryan Avent | Sep 23, 2009 | 2 Comments

On Monday, Elana Schor highlighted a recent column from occasionally right New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who once again rolled out one of his favorite policy prescriptions — an increased gas tax. Friedman wrote: Tom Friedman (Photo: IvyGate) According to the energy economist Phil Verleger, a $1 tax on gasoline and diesel fuel would […]

A Few Words on Transportation User Fees

By Ryan Avent | Sep 17, 2009 | 2 Comments

We tend to have a few good laughs when Randal O’Toole fires up his Cato computer and weighs in on transportation issues. It’s hard to take seriously a man who thinks that having the government tax people to build something which it then gives away for free is the libertarian ideal. Do federal gas taxes […]

Glaeser Takes an Unserious Look at High-Speed Rail

By Ryan Avent | Aug 5, 2009 | 8 Comments

Ed Glaeser is a very good economist, and his papers are indispensable reading for those interested in the workings of urban areas. But he is also a strident conservative, whose popular writings frequently challenge conventional progressive wisdom (and my own views). Harvard University economist Ed Glaeser (Photo: NPR) I was interested, then, to read that […]

Americans Still Use a Lot of Gas

By Ryan Avent | Jul 21, 2009 | 3 Comments

The release of the Department of Energy’s Transportation Energy Data Book is a transportation stat geek’s dream — 300-plus pages of numbers detailing the way the country burns this or that moving people and freight from city to city. Of course, not everyone gets a thrill from poring through data tables for hours at a […]

Stimulus Lesson: When Time is of the Essence, Invest in Transit

By Ryan Avent | Jun 30, 2009 | 1 Comment

To be effective, fiscal stimulus must be timely. The idea behind the policy is that in recession, households and businesses have an excess demand for savings — everyone decides that they want to save at the same time, with nasty effects — and so by borrowing those savings and spending them, the federal government can […]

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