In the least few weeks Andrew Sullivan has developed something of an obsession with raising the Federal Gas Tax by something like 400% (he wants to raise it by a dollar a gallon or thereabouts). Mr. Sullivan, who freely admits that he does not even know how to drive (let alone own a car) thinks that this would be an admirable “personal sacrifice” on the part of individuals (except, of course, for himself).

In this, Mr. Sullivan joins the ranks of those other deficit-obsessed conservatives who seem unable to comprehend that, if one wishes to deal with the deficit, the best way of doing it is to cut spending- not to strangle the economy with hateful taxes. Thrown into this is just a little bit of the sort of sixteen year-old boy who refuses to learn to drive because he can, “ride his bike anywhere” and who, because of this feeling, develops a sort of strange contempt for the eminently sensible drivers and owners of automobiles.

I’m already on the record as suggesting that worrying about a few billion in deficits while doing nothing about the long-term costs of Social Security and Medicare is a lot like cleaning your driveway in anticipation of a flood, but still I’ll meet Mr. Sullivan in his game of “we all must sacrifice.” (In the interests of full disclosure, I should add that I’m opposed to a rise in the Federal Gas Tax because I consistently fill my tank on my regular forays into northern Washington, thereby realizing a considerable savings for myself). Sullivan doesn’t drive, so he’s not sacrificing a damned thing by calling for higher gas taxes. So, let’s have him chip in, shall we?

While reading up on the gas tax, I came across an interesting coincidence. The annual revenue generated by the present Federal tax on gasoline is about $20 billion a year. Guess how much the Federal Government is planning on spending on AIDS in the next year? Almost exactly twenty billion dollars.

Frankly, I think we could do away with all of that and save $20 billion for the purposes of deficit reduction. That’s something like $200 billion over the course of a decade: enough to pay for half a year’s defense budget or a war the size of the one in Iraq. That’s an awful lot of money for the sake of a bunch of people who require constant medical care to survive and who largely contracted the disease that is killing them as a result of their own actions.

In fact, if President Bush really wants to win a few votes with a few Federal Dollars, he could propose the elimination of all Federal AIDS funding and use the funds (with a few billion cut from other programs) to eliminate the Federal Gas Tax altogether. Frankly, the odds are that all of the people who care enough about AIDS to vote on the issue are going to be voting for Democrats anyways whereas people who care enough about the price of gas at the pump to vote on it could easily be pushed into the GOP camp.

I mean, let’s face it, present-day talk of an AIDS “crisis” in America is nothing less than a hoax. The CDC reports that there were 26,424 new cases of HIV in the United States in 2002. 16,819 of these cases were the result of gay sex or injection drug use. 5949 occurred in women as a result of heterosexual contact. It is fair to presume that a fair number of those six thousand cases were the result of gay men (or drug-injecting men) having sexual contact with unknowing women.

In short, only a tiny percentage of new HIV cases occurred among people who were not fairly obviously at fault for their own infection or the victims of people who were. HIV/AIDS in the United States today is not “everyone’s disease”, it’s a disease largely contracted and spread by gay men and drug users whose irresponsibility costs the taxpayers as much as they fork out to the Federal Government in gas taxes every single year. The climate of fear created with regard to the spread of HIV/AIDS between innocent heterosexuals is a great deal of nonsense. So far as AIDS is not a “gay disease” it is because gay men spread it beyond their own ranks. Those who disagree with me on this point should read Randy Shilts’s book And the Band Played On, a wholly pro-gay account of the early years of the AIDS crisis. It confirms what we all know: there’s a reason they originally named the disease GRID.

Instead of grossly and unfairly burdening hard-working Americans who want to drive a few miles, let’s take a look for some expensive programs that subsidize personal irresponsibility. Here’s a good start.