Bad Mileage Is Good For You

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) is lobbying again against federal standards requiring automakers to improve automobile mileage of their cars. They claim that Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards force automakers to build smaller, more dangerous vehicles. As we document in our Impropaganda Review section, CEI has been flogging this argument for years, using questionable evidence. And who are they to talk about safety, anyway? Tobacco is the single largest cause of preventable death in America, yet CEI (which gets part of its funding from the tobacco industry) defends cigarettes by saying "there are things more valuable than health" and urging people to "think of smoking as a civic duty."