Green Taxes in the NY Times

Today's New York Times editorialized in favor of federal gas taxes and carbon taxes that would "pull triple duty by raising revenue, reducing dependence on foreign oil and helping the environment."

I have just two quibbles:

1) Why differentiate (as the editorial does) between a gas tax and a "tax on industrial carbon emissions"? A tax on all carbon emissions would include a tax on gasoline and would yield economic and environmental benefits by treating all sources of carbon equally.

2) The editorial claims that the federal deficit is $415 billion, but this is misleadingly low because it includes as current revenue an estimated $153 billion that is being "saved" (primarily in the Social Security Trust Fund) to help shore up retirement programs in the years ahead. Eliminating this double-counting shows the true deficit to be more like $568 billion. This is shown in Table 1 of the Congressional Budget Office's recent budget outlook. (Note that their estimate, which came out in September, predicted a "off-budget deficit" of $422 billion, not $415 billion. I come up with $568 billion for the "on-budget deficit" by adjusting the CBO estimate to account for this slight difference.)