Clinton/McCain gas tax plan – dumbest idea yet
Michael Bloomberg chimes in on the latest pander from Clinton and McCain.
Tom Friedman is even tougher on these lame politicians.
It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.
When the summer is over, we will have increased our debt to China, increased our transfer of wealth to Saudi Arabia and increased our contribution to global warming for our kids to inherit.
Posted in: Economy, Energy Independence, President 2008
Tags: Economy, Energy Independence, President 2008
McCain could solve a lot of problems by simply naming HIllary as his running mate.
Clinton and McCain obviously share a deep affection for each other and both dislike Obama. More importantly they both have a strong track record of supporting George Bush’s war in Iraq, having voted together to authorise the war.
McCain Clinton is an obvious and logical choice.
“This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks.”
Please explain to me how the F letting us keep our hard earned – 18.4 cents per gallon – is “money laundering?” Granted it’s a small percentage of what we pay for gas, but anytime we get to keep our own money HAS to be a good thing. Is it a gimmick? Absolutely – but the premise is perfectly sound.
The use of the term money laundering is certainly a provocation that is far from the truth, but the gent who wrote the linked article if you read it, is not actualing saying that it is money laundering to eliminate the fuel tax during the summer, he is saying it is stupid to stop the tax and incentive more consumption
what it boils down to is
* about 20% of the money the US government spends per year is money we don’t have, because our GOP government spends more money than they take in by taxes.
* to finance this deficit spending, the US government issues debt in the form of bonds, and the biggest customer of those bonds is the Chinese government,
* The US government is also a huge customer of crude oil, and it would be true based on the above, that about 20% of the crude oil we buy is paid for by money we borrow from overseas governments including China. When we tax that same crude, in effect some percent of the tax revenue is associated with crude oil we bought on borrowed money.
A sort of laundering, in that criminals do the same thing but the worser of two evils would be to increase consumption by lowering the tax because we would simply be using more borrowed money to buy oil from Saudi without putting any money in our own pockets….