The Political Chase

Lawmakers should call Clinton’s bluff on gas tax holiday bill

(Updated below)

Although Hillary Clinton cannot find a single expert to support her gas tax holiday plan, Clinton intends to introduce legislation for it. Nancy Pelosi spoke out against it today, and anybody that can’t see Clinton is pandering and votes for her simply on that issue alone, deserves exactly what the get.

It is impossible to make happen, but the best thing that could happen would be for the Senate to vote on her bill Monday morning. Absent that, lawmakers should follow Pelosi’s lead and make it known publicly this is nothing but a scam.

Update: More experts slam Hillary’s gas tax plan in a Bloomberg piece.

[Economists] say the oil companies may end up the biggest beneficiaries, while the aid to families wouldn’t be enough to buy a $35 backpack.

The trouble with the plan, they say, is that oil prices are rising because of low supplies, and companies will continue to charge the average $3.60 a gallon and just pocket the money that would have gone to federal taxes.

“That’s $10 billion, and it’s going into the pockets of oil refiners,” said Leonard Burman of the Tax Policy Center in Washington. “The last time I checked, they didn’t need it.”

Supplies are “being cleared at the current price,” said Donald Parsons, an economics professor at George Washington University in Washington. “If you take away the tax, you’ll have the same number of consumers willing to buy the gas at the same total price.”

Senator Clinton, 60, a New York Democrat, embraced the proposal that McCain, 71, an Arizona Republican, floated in a speech on April 15. McCain’s idea originated not with his economic advisers but with Republican pollster Bill McInturff….

“I don’t know any prominent economist who favors this McCain-Clinton proposal,” Greg Mankiw, former chairman of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers and author of a bestselling economics text, said on his blog….

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank called the proposal a “bad idea.”

“I think it would be counterproductive,” Frank said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital With Al Hunt,” to be aired later today. “I don’t think it would be a significant savings for the individual. It would be more of a cost.”