By Larry Marsh, Kansas City Star Midwest Voices columnist 2009

In today's Financial Times*** law professors Michael Levine and Mark Roe propose a tax at the pump with all the tax revenues given back to voters as tax credits or refunds. Each taxpayer would get back the amount of gas tax paid by the average taxpayer. This is similar to my proposal to return oil tariffs in a "monthly family allowance" in "New oil tariff would cut consumption, spur renewables."

The new twist offered by Levine and Roe is to allow taxis to get back the average tax paid by registered taxis and truckers to get back the average tax paid by truckers, and so forth for all well-defined fuel-using categories. Perhaps some categories would be defined by a combination of tonnage and miles driven.

The bad news for people driving gas guzzlers is that they would pay more at the pump than they would get back. The good news is that fuel-efficient drivers would get back more than they paid. The more you can cut back your gas usage the better this deal becomes.

Throwing more money into the pot from oil tariffs and the sale of carbon credits could sweeten the deal. In that way the average person could get more back than what they paid at the pump. Now that's a deal worth considering.

*** Financial Times, Tuesday, July 7, 2009 on page 9: "How to make a petrol tax politically viable" by Michael Levine, law professor at New York University School of Law, and Mark Roe, law professor at Harvard Law School.

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