TAX WHAT YOU DON'T WANT, NOT WHAT YOU DO:

By golly, we've done it. We've found a tax Senator Sanders isn't interested in raising.

The gas tax has long created peculiar alliances and alignments in our politics. Plenty of economists we typically think of as libertarian or right-wing have expressed sympathy for the gas tax. Gary Becker and Bill Niskanen are among the gas tax's cautious admirers. In 2006, Milton Friedman was asked if there were any taxes he liked. Here's his response, from the San Jose Mercury News:

Yes, there are taxes I like. For example, the gasoline tax, which pays for highways. You have a user tax. The property tax is one of the least bad taxes, because it's levied on something that cannot be produced -- that part that is levied on the land. So some taxes are worse than others, but all taxes are bad.

(That last bit, "Some taxes are worse than others, but all taxes are bad," is a pretty good approach to conservative tax policy.)

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