"The effect of freezing mileage rates lowers real wages after tax. This might have the unintended benefit of moving more trips to public transport, reducing congestion, pollution, and carbon emissions. But it's also going to reduce the number of people willing to do jobs that require a lot of driving, and many of those are frontline workers we all depend on. Ideally, this might be an opportunity to re-examine tax deductions for mileage more broadly - possibly even leaving those lower so that the costs of using a car are more visible, but making this up with higher standard deductions or wage increases."

- Associate Professor at the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick and Senior Fellow at the Energy Policy Institute, University of Chicago