Sharp Skirts

Hillary is trying to buy votes at the cost of $.30 a day by repealing the federal gas tax. That’s an annual price tag of $28 she has put on her desperate campaign and it’s an idea running on empty.

This sorely underestimates the intelligence of the voting public as well. Who believes oil companies will pay the gas tax reinvented as a windfall profit tax without raising the price at the pump? There’s nothing prohibiting the oil companies from adjusting their price after the government adjusts their costs. And, there are just a few of us who remember the gas lines the last time Congress tried to fix the price of gas.

On ABC’s This Week today, Hillary said she doesn’t need an economist’s approval to know this is an idea that works for working Americans. This is more governing from the gut directed towards earning the allusive political capital she thought she had in the bag. I’d like to hear the new ideas experts believe could work for all of us, something that works for the next three months and the next three years.

Hillary’s proposal isn’t just about the short term as she insisted. It’s simply short sighted. This proposed holiday will put a few extra pennies in the average American’s pockets for a few days but that change will continue to do less and less for us without real solutions.

She can keep my thirty cents because I want more. I want 50 mpg to be the norm the next time I shop for a car and I want a concern about global warming to drive government decision making like it drives my decisions at home. Is it hard? yes. Is it more expensive? Yes. But I believe I’m worth it and protecting our future quality of life is more important than empty rhetoric about punishing the oil companies.

This isn’t their problem, it’s ours. They’re the suppliers and we’re the addicts and those roles will persist until we do something to break that addiction. We don’t need a price break. We need an intervention.