Please excuse the lame Borat reference in the title of this post.

Of all the dubious, questionable, counterproductive, and downright backwards economic advice I’ve ever heard, this suggestion, from the Michigan Infrastructure and Transportation Association has got to take the cake:

[S]pokesman Mike Nystrom says MITA hopes to sell lawmakers and drivers on a 9-cent gas tax increase… raising the 15-cent-a-gallon diesel tax by 4 cents a gallon… also is pushing for increased state fees for registering and licensing vehicles… as much as a 50%.”

It gets worse: Nystrom says, “We think this is something that could help pull Michigan’s economy out of the doldrums…”

We don’t need a bazillion acres of the second-most scarce resource known to man, lying idle from now until infinity – so sell some of the millions and millions of acres worth of state land. Lakeside/creekside condos are nice, tourism is a boon for the economy. If you’re worried about conservationism, then just throw in some deed restrictions and limit the development in that manner. It’s a one-time injection of cash, plus an annuity in the form of property taxes.

So the problem appears to have an easy solution, which would also be amenable to vacationers, businessmen, real-estate agents, homebuilders, surveyors, developers and so on. But I’ve strayed. What I’m really curious about is this: How does taxing the citizens of the state of Michigan (i.e., making their disposable income smaller) help the economy? How will a gas-tax hike, or an increase in DMV fees help Ford, which lost nearly 13 Billion dollars last year? The price of gas also does not discriminate by socioeconomic status – in this regard, its regressive. Additionally, the price of gas affects the prices of pretty much every tangible good in existence; and this increase will also be borne largely by the consumers, many of whom in Michigan are suffering from decades of Big Labor incompetence. You’d be hard-pressed to convince me that we’re not in the running for a new Toyota manufacturing facility because our roads are bad.

Because if taxing people really is the solution to creating wealth, we can pretty much erase the entire history of economic theory and start over.

The smart money, however, is on history – not MITAs pipe dreams.