Below The Beltway

Apparently, the House Republican leadership has signed on to the phony gas tax holiday idea:

[T]he gas-tax relief idea just won’t die. On Thursday, House Republican Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said he’s supporting a bill by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., to suspend the gasoline tax this summer.

“The common sense plan unveiled today by Rep. Ryan helps bring down gas prices by eliminating the federal gas tax during the summer months so American families can take their summer vacations with less strain on their budgets,” Boehner said in a statement Thursday.

Boehner’s probably heard that economists don’t think it’ll amount to much, and he may not put much stock in their pronouncements. That would put him in the same camp as Clinton, who said on ABC’s “This Week” show, “I’m not going to put my lot in with economists.”

The thing is, you expect that kind of economic ignorance from Democrats, especially Democrats who’ve built their career on pandering with phony populism the way Hillary Clinton has. Republicans are supposed to be the guys who actually listen to economists, but here we’ve got John Boehner, who’s supposed to be one of the new breed of Republicans in the House signing on to an idea that won’t help the average American one bit and is unlikely to have any impact on the price of gas at the pump.

Why ?

It is, I think, very simple. Whenever there’s an issue that the public is focused on, politicians want the public to think they are doing something, even if it’s something that, in the end, won’t really deal with the problem. Usually, that involves proposing some new government program, subsidy, or agency to “study” the issue. And, sometimes, it involves proposing a phony solution like the gas tax holiday. Whatever it is, it let’s politicians tell the public that they “care” and that they’re actually doing something, even when, as usual, they’re not.

Freedom Democrats make this observation about the House GOP’s sudden embrace of schemes like the gas tax holiday:

If a politician is proposing that they can lower gasoline prices in a time-frame as near as this summer, then we basically have to conclude that they are proposing price controls. Since the Republicans are championing these price controls, we have to assume that they expect Americans to behave like Iranians, Nigerians, or the French — who protest/riot whenever the prices of basic commodities rise.

Sometimes, it seems like that’s exactly the kind of country we’re headed forIn the case of “high” gas prices, the truth that no politician is willing to talk about, not even Barack Obama who proposes the same stupid “windfall profits” tax that Hillary Clinton does, is that there isn’t an easy answer. The price of a gallon of gas is controlled by a myriad of factors ranging from the price of oil to what season of the year it is to supply problems caused by the weather (remember the shortages in the week or so after Hurricane Katrina ?). It’s a worldwide market, and there really isn’t anything the government can do to bring the price down except one thing:

They can get the heck out of the way.

There hasn’t been a refinery built in this country in 30 years, does anyone think that maybe that’s one of the reasons we have supply problems ?

There are as many different formulations of gasoline as there are regions of the country (the gasoline sold in California, for example, can’t be sent to the East Coast because it doesn’t meet the correct environmental standards and vice versa), isn’t it just possible that requiring refineries to make incompatible formulations of gasoline leads to supply problems that are then reflected in the price of gas ?

And, most importantly, we’re sitting on top of huge amounts of undeveloped oil supplies in places like ANWR. Why shouldn’t we drill ?

All of these are government polices that, in effect, artificially limit the supply of oil and gasoline. And what happens when supply is limited and demand is relatively inelastic ?

You guessed it, the price goes up.