Over at The Washington Post, Alec MacGillis and Steve Mufson bust out with a pretty good A1 article on Clinton, Obama, and the gas tax. That's the sort of placement that gets read by the producers of the nation's cable news shows, so we'll see if Clinton's counterproductive pander gets some play here. What you'd really want to do if you were worried about the pain of gas prices isn't lower gas prices per se, but create some sort of rebate, stimulus, or tax credit system for low income folks. After all, if energy costs were the only expense that had increased, but wages had seen twice as much growth, it would be really dumb to spend a lot of time worrying about gas prices. But that's not happened. Rather, the issue here is the aggregate effect of energy costs and other assorted expenses (housing, health, food, clothing, etc), combined with stagnating and deteriorating wages, which are making it tough for families to stay ahead of inflation. Lowering the gas tax is not only counterproductive from an environmental standpoint and ineffective as an economic measure, but it's misunderstanding the nature of the problem.
