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Maybe the Iowa Legislature will raise the tax on gasoline this year, but only a little; it will be hard to demand too much from the citizens in the midst of a scary recession. Will Congress enact a higher federal gas tax? Also possible, but doubtful.

But if they have the nerve to plunge ahead, it will be the right step. Higher gas taxes are beginning to appear both necessary and inevitable.

The National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission will recommend upping the federal gas tax by 10 cents per gallon, a 54 percent increase from the 18.4 cents a gallon levied since 1993.

Here in Iowa, the state Department of Transportation reported that we need to come up with another $267 million a year to keep up with highway repairs.

Raising gas taxes is like raising the tax on cigarettes; you have to decide whether you’re trying to get more money or change people’s behavior. Those goals are somewhat contradictory; reducing smoking leads to taxing fewer packs of cigarettes, and reducing driving means you tax fewer gallons of gas.

In both cases, less consumption is a good thing. Unfortunately, in both cases there are predictable and unintended economic consequences.

Many businesses would feel the impact of higher fuel prices. They would pass along the costs, and all kinds of customers would be affected, from long-distance commuters to stay-at-homers.

For society as a whole, the bottom line is that somebody has to pay to maintain highways and bridges. The gasoline tax isn’t a perfect allocation of the expenses of our most-used transportation system – if you walk to work, you don’t wear out the infrastructure, but you still benefit from the products delivered by trucks. Still, it’s about as close as we can come to fairness; the more you use the highways and bridges, the more you pay for their construction and maintenance.

The money has to come from somewhere.