According to the Washington Post (excerpt):
A growing chorus -- including a top congressional Democrat -- labeled Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's proposal for suspending the federal gasoline tax ineffective and shortsighted yesterday, even as she continued to paint Sen. Barack Obama as insensitive to drivers' woes for not endorsing the plan.
Obama spoke about how the proposed 3-month gas tax "holiday" would only result in a $30 savings for most households. A point that I think might be added into the mix is infrastructure. Perhaps we should pull out some video of last year's Minnesota bridge collapse (pictured, above left)? Bridges and roads are in terrible shape nationwide. Suspending the gas tax would have a tiny effect on each taxpayer's wallet, but would have major implications for spending on infrastructure.
We have gargantuan amounts of work to do on the energy front. Band-aid measures like gas tax holidays will not get that work done --- plain and simple. How about a government SUV buy-back program instead? Offer drivers of the largest SUVs a chance to unload those monsters, because as it stands, NOBODY is buying them...particularly not the budget-minded shoppers in the used car market!
Obama is avoiding Clinton and McCain's pandering. (Pictured: Sen. Clinton riding with a "regular Joe" in a pickup truck to demonstrate the importance of car-pooling. She carpools all the time...pooling multiple cars to get her to her destination! She left the motorcade back at the hotel for a few minutes! Wouldn't it have made a better pojnt if she'd carpooled with a mom with her 2.2 kids on the way to daycare and work in her minivan, rather than a blue collar guy in his F-250 hemi?).
Once again, Obama refuses to just "tell us what we want to hear" because it would be popular. May it continue. As he said at a campaign speech this week:
"This isn't an idea designed to get you through the summer. It's an idea designed to get them through an election."
And some reaction from ABC news:
2 comments:
Elise, I am very tired of this political season. Of course he's right. It is a short term "fix". A short term fix however for a nation of people with a very short attention span,one whose public generally cant see the tip of its own nose in this chaotic machiavellian fog of realpolitik that Clinton, McCain, and the status-quo-ers in Washington have created during this (and almost every) election cycle. The longer this thing goes on the more convoluted and confused everything will become.
I'm tired, too...and if we're tired, can you image who Barack feels at this point? What about Michelle?
Hopefully we won't have to be tired much longer.
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