Just when you thought Republicans couldn’t come up with anything worse to do to this country, along comes proof they always, always can. Did you think George Bush’s tax rebate, which will plunge our government even deeper into debt, was awful? Well John McCain has a plan to postpone impending economic disaster that will not only do nothing to help in the long run, but which will hasten global warming to boot.
John McCain wants us to burn more gasoline. Yes, he wants us to take to the roads this summer and burn, baby, burn. Our incentive? Artificially cheaper gas prices that come, not at the expense of oil company profits, but at the price of our crumbling infrastructure and ballooning deficit.
Yes, you guessed it. He wants to cut taxes on gasoline.
It also was unclear how McCain would pay for his proposed gas-tax holiday, which would run from Memorial Day to Labor Day. The federal gas tax is 18.4 cents per gallon; 24.4 cents for diesel. The idea would cost the federal Highway Trust Fund, already at risk of going broke next year, billions of dollars…
“That takes $11 billion away from infrastructure spending on roads and bridges, which are badly in need of help as we saw with last summer’s bridge collapse,” said James Kvaal, domestic policy adviser for the liberal Center for American Progress Action Fund, a Washington research group.
So how do we deal with the problems caused by our national carefree summer road trip? Dunno.
“The senator is not planning to raise taxes,” [McCain's chief economic policy adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin] said repeatedly…
Of course not. Republicans don’t tax and spend, they borrow and spend.
Holtz-Eakin said money would be taken from general funds to ensure that the Highway Trust Fund didn’t run short. But the budget deficit already is projected at $500 billion.
And according to some economists, we are too far gone now to ever get back to the balanced budget Bill Clinton achieved and left in the care of George W. Bush.
[Rudy Penner, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute], a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, said…”Those deficits are going to look awfully big as the new president takes office, and it will be very hard to do what President Bush did — claim the budget balances in 2012, or maybe ever again if you do honest projections.”
Emphasis added.
There’s one other teeny, tiny flaw with McCain’s logic. Who are these people that are going to pack up the family and drive? Surely it’s not all those folks facing foreclosure, or the ones being laid off, or trying to figure out how to pay three times more for bread and milk at the grocery store. I guess they should just listen to McCain and forget all that impending doom. Heck, let’s go to DisneyWorld! Let’s pack up for Branson! Maybe we’ll swing by Vegas while we’re on the road. I’ll go warm up the Navigator and you kids grab your iPods. It’s going to be a long drive.
There are amerikans with enough money to take trips?
“…trying to figure out how to pay three times more for bread and milk at the grocery store”
High gas prices contribute to the above. Perhaps if the trucks that bring the bread and milk, and the tractors on the farms that provide the wheat for the bread and the hay for the cows that give the milk all pay less for diesel, then prices come down. Taxes are a leech on productivity. McCain doesn’t want “Artificially cheaper gas prices”, he wants gas to stop being artificially high with a tacked on tax taking money out of the pockets of the people who drive the economy.
Not saying this is the end-all-be-all of economic stimulus, but doesn’t sound like a bad idea to me. As for infrastructure, no-one can seriously make the argument that the $11bn that this will cost can’t come from somewhere else in the 3 trillion in tax revenue the federal government collects. Take it from somewhere that doesn’t put undue burden on our farmers, truckers, and families, please.