It would be popular to suspend Florida's gasoline tax as several legislators are proposing, but it would not be prudent. The unprecedented pump prices of recent days - which do seem to be easing - are not the only ill wind from Hurricane Katrina and its predecessors last year. Repairs to Florida's transportation systems will be costing an estimated $1.4-billion (so far) and the infrastructure was already billions of dollars in arrears before the storms struck. Fuel taxes are essential to meeting those needs. Federal aid won't fill the bill.
An even stronger case against that particular form of tax relief is that it would undercut what the market is telling motorists about conserving gasoline - to drive slower, more carefully, and less often, and to do it in more efficient vehicles.
Although the possibility of excessive profiteering cannot be discounted, the underlying, pre-Katrina high prices owed mostly to the perception that world demand is overtaking the energy industry's capacity. Sympathetic fuel tax cuts, even temporary ones, would muddle the message that motorists need to hear.
What motorists deserve more than a subsidy is the assurance that the energy markets have not taken unfair advantage of the hurricane emergency. Attorney General Charlie Crist and Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson are properly pursuing that line of inquiry past the pump to the distributor level. The Federal Trade Commission should follow the trail all the way to the major oil companies themselves.
