progressive with respect to income. This has been shown in Table 6-7 where the greatest gains in air quality were registered in the lower income ranges.

Restrictions on private automobile operation are the measures most frequently suggested to reduce air pollution. Most proposals would increase the cost of owning or operating a car; those commonly mentioned are (1) parking taxes, (2) more elaborate emission controls, (3) increases in gasoline prices, and (4) taxes on cars according to engine size or gross weight. A step which would reduce costs is more carpooling. Increasing costs for buying and operating a car would obviously fall heavily on the poor. Although 47 percent of the poor own no car now and would not be immediately affected by increasing costs, increases would make it progressively harder for them to gain access to cars, which are still the most important mode of transportation to work.

Industrial emission control—leading to higher prices for finished industrial goods—would probably mean benefits distributed somewhat progressively, while the costs, although regressive, would be partially offset by the smaller proportion of incomes spent by the poor for industrial products as opposed to food and shelter.

The effect of cleaning up one source of air pollution—electric utilities—is unknown. Rates would increase to cover higher costs, but since the poor consume only a small amount of electricity, raising the upper end of the rate structure would have a progressive effect, while proportional raises or raises concentrated on the lower end of the rate structure would be regressive. At present, poor people are discriminated against by electric utilities through the declining block rate pricing system. The fact that they are disproportionately victims of the utilities' pollution lends weight to proposals for flattening or inverting the rate structure.

Although there are reasonable grounds for supporting antipollution measures as strongly beneficial to poor and other disadvantaged people, an antipollution program will not solve their problems. It should not be promoted as a solution: there is no substitute for a direct attack on social problems. However, it is not true that the poor and other disadvantaged groups have no interest in pollution abatement. These people are saddled with the dirtiest air in the nation. It is wrong to suggest that clean air is only important to middle class lungs.