'Unexpectedly!', Fox Butterfield Exclaimed

“Gasoline-Tax Increase Finds Little Support,” a dejected New York Times reports. Go figure:

When gasoline topped $4 a gallon, opponents of an increase in the gas tax argued that prices were already too high.

Now the average price of regular gas has dropped under $2.50 a gallon, but in the antitax environment that pervades Washington there is still scant support for increasing the gas tax to finance upkeep of the nation’s roadways and public transit systems.

The no-win dynamic is frustrating to advocates who hoped falling gas prices might reinvigorate the idea of raising the gas tax, which they view as one of the simplest, fairest and most efficient ways to pay for transportation repairs and improvements.

If there’s one thing you can count on, it’s the MSM plumping for a gas tax increase whenever gas prices are temporarily low, and the economy either appears wreckable, or after it’s just been wiped out. Such was the case of December of 2008, immediately after Barack Obama had won, and the MSM longed for a new FDR to preside over eight years (or more!) of the hoped-for Dickensian wreckage to follow. NBC in the form of Tom Brokaw, the Washington Post, and yes, the same New York Times who published the above story, all begged, in coordinated, Jounolist-style fashion for the public face of the infamous Office of President Elect to stick it to the voters who elected him, good and hard. (Oh how they’d get their wish, in just about every way but a gas tax, curiously. QED.)

Incidentally, the URL of yesterday’s Times story decodes as “Support For Gas Tax Increase Still Nil Despite Falling Prices.”

Fox Butterfield, is that you?

Related: At Ace of Spades, “The Gods of the Copybook Headings have been rudely shown the door, yet they are patient and enduring.” And “a comparison of the state-imposed energy taxes/fees courtesy of the American Petroleum Institute.”

Update: The comments at Hot Air’s link to yesterday’s NYT article are instructive as well — even if today’s Fox Butterfields at the New York Times will likely never see them to better understand those mysterious people out there in flyover country.