if you think this idea has merit go and VOTE at Change.org. The top 10 ideas are going to be presented to the Obama Administration on Inauguration Day and will be supported by a national lobbying campaign run by Change.org, MySpace, more than a dozen leading nonprofits after the Inauguration. So each idea has a real chance at becoming policy.
Oil at its 22 month low and America is heading to $1.25 a gallon gasoline, yet as recently as May, Chrysler was offering to let consumers “lock in” $2.99 gasoline for 3 years. Such is the foresight of our car companies, and an interesting indicator of what consumers were not only willing to pay for, but was actually an incentive. There is also indication that more Americans have continued to adopt public transportation at a record rate. Oil imports rose by a record amount during October assuring continued pressure driving gas prices further down.
I informally polled a group that we should tax gasoline to stabilize gas prices and generate revenue, and got some surprisingly positive responses, enough where I thought it was worth thinking about some more. I actually proposed it to be a flexible tax that essentially kept gas prices at a stable level that consumers were ok with.
I think the key to taxing gasoline use the proceeds to fund research into alternative technology/fuels and manufacturing technology that the American car industry (and maybe others if they pay) can share and use to build new American cars. We should use the money to fund the enormous effort it will take to retool and modernize the entire American car industry. Our car companies could win again but overhauling, rethinking, and rebuilding the American industry is going to be a Herculean effort.
Not only would taxing gasoline drive revenue to fund this effort but it would also serve to help us as a nation conserve. Surely conserving such valuable and strategic non-renewable resource is a patriotic act, especially if it went to fund growing a technological and innovation base right here.
I believe we need a management change and we need to hire visionary leaders, change agents, that can help lead an industry. We need the equivalent of Tom Peters or Steve Jobs to help change the industry. We need someone to help us create insanely great cars.
The car industry is so critical to the future industrial competitiveness of our country we need to involve leading thinkers and innovators. Michael Porter, Gary Hamel, Mark Cuban, and C.K. Prahalad could advise and facilitate the development of long term strategy for the industry ecosystem. Hire Guy Kawasaki as the evangelist. Involve Steve Jobs and Johnathan Ives in rethinking design. Involve Clay Shirky, Tim O’Reilly, and Lawrence Lessig work on how technology, open source, and creative commons can be applied in an industry. Put the guys from top gear as head of product testing 
You get the picture hire superstar business people and innovators to turn this around not bureaucrats, sycophants and lobbyists.
As a tax payer I would invest in car companies to tide them over until you institute a gas tax if I had confidence they were going to hire leaders and not managers to turn these companies around.
I’ve added this idea to Change.org so please go there and comment, criticize, and vote. We don’t deserve failed leadership in such a critical industry as transportation, it is part of our competitive advantage as a nation. It’s very patriotic to conserve Oil.
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It’s very patriotic to conserve Oil.