Archive for Oil

Murphy Tackles the White House 2014 Budget Proposal

I like to beat up on Paul Ryan etc. for being faux-tough on the fiscal problem, but man oh man, in this IER post I go through the Obama Administration’s 2014 Budget Proposal. They don’t even pretend to improve things. I ended up writing this post pretty late at night, and was feeling saucy. I [...]

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IMF Study Calling for US Gas Taxes Is Pretty Sneaky

I give the details in this IER blog post: So how does the IMF study come up with such whopping tax proposals? Let’s walk through their Appendix Table 1 (page 44) to see the breakdown of their fuel tax suggestions… The proposal for the United States is 36 cents per liter, which works out to [...]

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New NERA Study on Two Carbon Tax Scenarios

NERA Economic Consulting is out with a very nice study on two carbon tax scenarios. I know this modeling team (well, at least the lead author) and I think they are very nuanced in their analysis; if you scroll through the paper you can see they explain exactly what their charts are saying, etc. This [...]

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An Odd Proposal to Tax Oil, From the CFR

In this IER post I take on a new paper (published through the Council on Foreign Relations) to impose a $50/barrel tax on crude oil. Some excerpts: The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) recently released a study by Daniel Ahn and Michael Levi showing how a new tax on oil—which would ultimately raise pump prices [...]

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Carbon “Tax Swap” Deals: A Review and Critique

In case you’re wondering what I mean when I talk about my “day job” stuff, here’s a good example: Today IER is releasing my new study [.pdf] with the above title. Here are excerpts from the Executive Summary: ========================= A growing number of academics and policymakers have recommended a revenue-neutral carbon “tax swap” deal, under [...]

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Hurricane Sandy and Gas Lines

It’s a multimedia blitz today at ConsultingByRPM: (BTW my sound is fine, the hair salon next door was having a party.)

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How Chris Christie’s License Plate Scheme Adds Insult to Injury

[UPDATE: Actually, I am not sure the below is relevant, after thinking it through some more. What I will defend is the statement that if we had a long period of price ceilings, with new gasoline supplies being brought into the region but where the demand consistently were higher than the available quantity supplied, and [...]

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Econ 101 Works! Price Controls Cause Gas Lines

I can’t believe I had to write this up, but there were a surprising number of people who thought it was a right-wing myth to claim that it was the price controls causing gas lines, rather than the hurricane. An excerpt, and note that I make a point about stockpiling beforehand that I haven’t seen [...]

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