ROMNEY ADVISER: “UP THE GAS TAX”
AMERICAN MOTORISTS: “UP YOURS!”
by Becky Burkett
Gregory Mankiw is a professor of economics at Harvard who is advising Mitt Romney - which reminds me of this vintage quote from Ronald Reagan: “An economist is someone who sees something that works in practice and wonders if it would work in theory.”
And Prof. Mankiw has this theory that what America needs right now is to dramatically jack up the cost of gasoline for your car. I kid you not.
“Driving your car is associated with various adverse side effects,” the Liberal-Minded Professor wrote in a recent op-ed published by the New York Times. “These include traffic congestion, accidents, local pollution and global climate change. If the tax on gasoline were higher, people would alter their behavior to drive less.”
Now, let’s be clear what Mitt Romney’s adviser is proposing here: Using the government to financially penalize citizens in order to compel them to do what the government wants them to do. You know, like ObamaCare. Or for that matter, RomneyCare.
In a 2-1 ruling Monday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals set a March 19th deadline for the Obama administration to explain whether or not it intends to use “prosecutorial discretion” to prevent the deportation of five suspected illegal immigrants. The appeals court also asked Obama how their decision whether or not to use “prosecutorial discretion” in this case would affect “any action to be taken by this court.”
More than 10 years after 9/11, illegal immigrants with long-expired visas remain tough to track. The criminal case against Amine El Khalifi, 29, only highlights how the U.S. government routinely fails to track millions of foreign visitors blatantly ignoring immigration law without consequence. Despite multiple run-ins with police in Northern Virginia where El Khalifi lived, he never came to the attention of federal law enforcement agencies until he became the target of an FBI probe following a landlord’s reporting of suspicious activity.
