You would be hard pressed to find someone who disagrees with the common wisdom that progressive taxation is the way to go. I guess we just consider it to be the fairest way to evenly distribute the necessary evil that is taxation. After all: why should someone below the poverty line pay the same taxes as someone above it? Obviously, that money means a lot more to the poor person than it does to the rich person.

And so we have built a progressive society, with the wealthy handing over significantly larger amounts of money to the government than the middle-class and the poor. People may bicker about percentages (some say the percentage the poor pay is too large and the percentage the rich pay is too small; others say the opposite), but it is an absolute fact that the vast majority of individual tax revenues come from the wealthier citizens of this country.

There are a few exceptions, though. Sin taxes (taxes on things that are generally regarded as vices, such as alcohol, tobacco, and gambling) are the first example that come to mind. These affect the poor disproportionately because, demographically speaking, more poor people spend money on vices than rich people. (I realize that I am generalizing here.)

When we raise the tax on cigarettes and alcohol, these affect the poor smokers and drinkers much more than the wealthy ones. Perhaps that’s the idea. Make it prohibitively expensive for poor people to smoke and drink so they stop wasting money on it altogether.  It’s a little manipulative – and little bit like letting Big Brother decide what’s best for us – but we allow it because we know that smoking and drinking aren’t exactly the keys to getting ahead in life.

So what’s the story when we raise taxes on something that almost everyone uses productively, like gasoline? Undoubtedly, this is a regressive tax because it affects poor drivers much more than wealthy ones. Does the same message of “we’re doing this so you stop making destructive decisions” apply?

Environmentalists might regard driving a car in the same light as they view smoking a cigarette, but the reality is that sometimes you really do need to drive somewhere. Quite often in fact. Most people don’t live in walking/biking distance of their job, the grocery store, and their child’s school – and even if they do, they probably still find reasons to drive now and again. I work from home and within a ten minute walk of almost any store I need and I find myself putting between 300 and 500 miles on my car every month no matter what.

Our governor repeats that we need more money for infrastructure every chance he gets. I understand – and I agree. But raising regressive taxes to get this money is simply not the way to go about it. Nor is raising taxes at all, for that matter. I wrote about this last week. There are other ways. You can’t tell me that, somewhere in that $35.8 billion budget O’Malley proposes, there isn’t some fat to be cut.