Holiday!
Celebrate!
——Madonna
The gas tax holiday is a fairly desperate effort to prove to an angry public that the administration is doing everything it can to get inflation under control. Unlike the pending proposal to reduce the tariffs on Chinese imports, it is bad policy. High gas prices are good for the environment, the tax is necessary to fund infrastructure improvements, and in any event, the magic of the marketplace has already started to work without government assistance. Gas prices have fallen significantly in the last week in response to fears about a recession–not that anyone in the media has noticed.
My guess is that it won’t pass, mostly because the GOP won’t support it. Having thus opposed a tax cut that would reduce inflation, the right will then bang on about how Biden has done nothing about inflation, and about how we need to cut taxes on business, thereby proving yet again that it is far more interested in power than principle.