This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, May 27th, 2017. I'm Caleb Brown.

As you go for that long drive this weekend, think about the power and efficiency of your car.

Café standards are a political answer to the strong desire to avoid taxing gasoline

excessively.

So what are the less appreciated effects of CaféFE standards versus gas taxes.

Peter Van Dooren, editor of Regulation magazine, explains.

Let's go back.

The origin of CAFE standards is with the first energy shock in the 70s.

In 1973, right? Gasoline prices went from 30-something a gallon to 50 cents a gallon and the world thought,

we thought the world was ending.

And the standard economic answer of if, well, if imports are a problem, right?

Dependency on foreign oil is a problem and we could have a completely

different discussion about whether that is true or not. If imports are a problem

if anything is a problem in economics, the economic answer is to tax it,

to change the price, right, to raise the price of something so that people consume less of it.

The one thing that members of Congress seem loath to do

is to increase explicitly the price of gasoline.

I'll tell the following anecdote of the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in the 1970s

was a congressman named Wayne Omen from Oregon.

Oregon is a progressive state.

So he proposed, he explicitly proposed a 50 cent at the time,

at the time, this is 40 years ago a 50 cent federal gasoline

...