[My first diary here, so please be patient....]
I have a thought about our framing the debate on the proposed "gas tax holiday" by Clinton and McCain. Gather 'round this here campfire an listen to my ramblings, kids....
To date, most of the counterarguments I've seen have revolved around insisting on how little the average American will save as a result of it. This counter has two distinct weaknesses, to my mind:
1. It's easy to make that argument look elitist. For instance, there are a lot of people out there who could really use an extra half tank of gas; "who do those politicians think they are minimizing the plight of the poor?"
2. When we talk about the "average" savings, people know that it's just that: an average. When Shrub was pushing his ill-conceived tax cuts through congress, he stressed the Average savings the "middle class" could expect from them. We who understood what the taxes were really about worked hard to educate our fellow citizens about what was behind the term "average" (one of my favorite illustrations: You put one thousand homeless people in a room with Bill Gates. The average net worth of the people in that room is more than 50 million dollars).
So here's what I humbly suggest: Frame the issue around the nature of the gas tax. It's an excise tax that's collected when the gasoline is produced, refined, or imported, rather than when it's sold. It's collected by the guvmint from the oil companies, not as a direct add-on at the pumps (like a sales tax). From there we can go on to spell out how it would be at the oil companies' discretion whether or not to pass along the savings. I see two advantages, and one big disadvantage to this approach:
Advantage 1. This plays on the average (there's that word again!) consumer's innate distrust of oil companies. As an avid Obamaniac, I hesitate to play on people's fears, but if that fear is well-founded, then.....
Advantage 2. Framing in this way opens the debate to a more realistic discussion of the weaknesses of Clinton's approach (even when compared to McCain's). Check this: McCain advocates simply doing without the taxes. Stupid--especially considering the shape of our national road infrastructure. But Clinton wants to couple the "holiday" with an obscene profits tax on the oil companies. Of course they will pass those costs along to the consumer, resulting in no real savings at the pump. The only thing it would do is cause the oil companies to do a bit of internal cost-shifting (instead of handing over the excise tax to the guvmint, they'd hand over their obscene profits tax).
Disadvantage: I fear that people are tired of hearing about this. Introducing another angle at this late stage may work to our detriment. Plus, while I give my fellow citizens a lot of credit for better understand the term "average", might it be too much to ask them to delve into the difference between excise and sales tax?
Just my thoughts on the matter. What're your thoughts?