I guess this appeals to the few die-hard nuts still voting Republican

Monday, April 21, 2008

So, John McCain's brilliant idea: suspend Federal gas taxes for the summer.
Seriously, does anyone think this is a good idea -- or that it will help anyone?
Let's see. The Federal gas tax is 18¢ per gallon. He wants to suspend that from Memorial Day through Labor Day, a period of three months.
Now, let's rip it apart.

• Let's say I have a typical car, it gets 25 miles per gallon and I fill it up once a week. At $3.90 a gallon for 10 gallons, I pay $39. For three months, I'd only pay $37.20. Whoa! I'm swimming in savings!
  
• Of course, gas prices won't be going down during those three summer months. So the odds are that I'd be paying more than $3.90 a gallon by that time anyway.
  
• McCain claims that there will be enormous economic stimulus with this tax suspension. Does he really think that I'm going to take my $1.80 in savings and plow it back into, say, housing? And does he really believe that in the space of three months the costs of food and other commodities affected by gas prices will readjust downward?
  
• The cost of this boondoggle would be something on the order of $9-10 billion. Gosh, for a man who wants to stay in Iraq for a hundred years, he's forgotten that those kinds of occupations cost lots of money.
  
• In an era where bridges are falling down, he wants to take $9 billion out of the funding for infrastructure?
  
• et cetera.
  

This kind of fiscal aptitude makes George W. Bush look like a whiz kid.

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