Day Thirty-three, April 27

In the second half of yesterday's post, I promised that in today's update I would be continue rambling about Obama's fuel policy, and ramble on I shall. What I'm specifically refering to is Senator McCain's proposed 'gas tax holiday', and Senator Obama's immediate opposition to this proposal. As he outlined in his economic policy speech ten days ago, McCain says that by eliminating the $.18 per gallon tax on gasoline from Memorial Day to Labor Day, we'll get a break on filling up our cars, which will even stimulate a fragile economy. Not so fast, says Barack. Calling the proposal the "latest scheme" by McCain, Obama quickly went on record and spoke out against such a deceptively quick fix on a mounting problem. "I’ve said I think John McCain’s proposal for a three-month tax holiday is a bad idea,” Obama said, as reported in last mon's Wall Street Journal. And he's right. By cutting taxes of eighteen cents on the gallon, individuals receive less than a five-percent discount with the current price of gas, and resulting in a savings of roughly $28 per consumer. But hey, that's almost $30 more I can spend on Obama stickers and placards, right?

This isn't even considering the amount of damage such a tax holiday would deal to our country's already weakened infrastructure. Senator Obama handily referenced the effects of such a scenario in his speech in Anderson, IN, slyly asking, "Remember that bridge in Minneapolis?".

The 'hopeful' moral of today's story is this: here's just one (great) example of how far Obama is willing to stick his neck out to speech the truth to Americans, at possibly serious expense to his campaign. Outside of the extremely rich, to which "high gas prices are mostly an annoyance", as Barack said in his address yesterday, everyone who drives a vehicle in the country is feeling the burn now more than ever whenever they gas up their cars. Trimming a little bit off the cost of gas--even if it didn't amount to that much in the long run--would still feel pretty good right now, and even better come July. But Obama has wasted no time in making it painfully obvious that such a deduction is not only misleading, but does nothing to fix the fuel crisis in the long-run. “We’re talking about 5 percent of your total cost of gas that you suspend for three months, which might save you a few hundred bucks that then will spike right up,” Obama said last week in an address at a community college in Pennsylvania. “Now keep in mind that it will save you that if Exxon Mobil doesn’t decide, ‘We’ll just tack on another 5 percent on the current cost.'” Considering how frequently gas prices have jumped in just the last week, such a scenario is not difficult to imagine.

Along the lines of those $600 checks from the fed that we'll be getting in the next few weeks, a holiday on gas taxes is a short-term 'solution' to a long-term problem, and one that we'll all be feeling long after the Memorial Day weekend this September. Instead of taking the road to good P.R. and supporting the tax suspension (like Senator Clinton has done), Obama has shown the serious face this country will need in order to come to terms with our dependence on oil, and the unrelenting rise of fuel costs. Loosening the belt on the economy may relieve some pressure temporarily, but it doesn't mean we're actually trimming back the fat, which is something that Obama has made clear on this and other issues. The only way we'll combat the unyielding rise on the price of gas is by limiting our dependence on it, and I'm glad to see Obama standing up for the real solution to this growing problem in our world.