I have to answer that in two parts based off the same incident, the $100 gas tax credit.

The first part comes from Senator Bill Frist’s office for proposing the idea. After all everyone knows that $100 isn’t going to make any difference to the average consumer, it’s only a $100 for [insert random diety name here]’s sake. What the Republican’s really needed to do was propose a 6 month moratorium on the Federal gas tax. That would carry people through the summer driving season until prices start to come down. Oh but wait:

The federal gas tax is $0.18 / gallon.

(.18 x 20) x 26 = 93.60, so the $100 is actually a little more than the average federal gas taxes for 6 months of the year.

Of course no one from the Senator’s office bothered to explain this when the s**t started to fly. They just showed the backbone of a bowl full of jello and blamed the idea on a staffer. Nothing like seeing everyone flee from an idea to fill a voter with confidence.

Part two is the reaction from other Republicans including Senator Thune, who originally pushed for a gas tax holiday on the federal gas tax, (essentially the same thing as what was proposed above) and John Boehner who between them called the plan stupid and insulting. In Boehner’s case he didn’t even know enough about it to know who had proposed the plan, so by running his mouth he managed to torpedoe one of his own party’s leaders. As we said in 2nd grade “smooth move, ex-lax.”

I think so far we have to place the Republican efforts on the low end of the politically astute scale, the question is can they improve or are they just too far gone?

This entry was posted on Monday, May 8th, 2006 at 8:19 pm by Chad and is filed under Your Tax Dollars In Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.