As Matthew Yglesias notes, George Stephanopoulos did a decent job challenging McCain on his gas tax holiday proposal over the weekend. It won't work, Stephanpoulos pointed out. Economist say it's a stupid idea. It's simply a subsidy for oil companies, and it'll go directly into their profit. McCain's reply?
This not only put the lie to McCain's faux-populism, but also his gas tax holiday idea. After all, we're in a moment of severe economic stress, during an age of rocketing inequality, when the tax rates on the rich aren't keeping pace with the growth in their incomes. And none of that has shamed McCain into proposing policies that ease the burdens of the poor rather than increase the square footage of the yachts favored by the rich. Why should oil companies -- which don't need to be elected, and are fully accustomed to being hated -- prove any more sensitive to public opinion?
there’s no economist in the country that knows very well the low-income American who drives the furthest, in the oldest automobile, that sometimes can’t even afford to go to work...We would make them shamed [the oil companies] into it. We, of course, know how to — American public opinion. And we would penalize them, if necessary. But they wouldn’t. They would pass [the savings] on.So McCain's argument here is that the poor in this country need serious help, and so we're going to subsidize oil companies and try to leverage public opinion to shame them to pass some of those subsidies back to consumers in the form of price cuts at the pump. To call this a bank shot insults bank shots everywhere. If John McCain think that low-income Americans need more money in their pocket, there's an extremely straightforward channel for him to achieve that goal: The American tax code. There, McCain can simply pursue his priorities and address distributional concerns at will. He need not pay off a middleman then try and use the bully pulpit to get the middle man to offer price cuts to the poor (and also the rich, and also the upper middle class). But McCain doesn't believe the poor need more money in their pocket. And I know this because I've looked at his tax plan, which breaks down, according to the Tax Policy Center, like this:
This not only put the lie to McCain's faux-populism, but also his gas tax holiday idea. After all, we're in a moment of severe economic stress, during an age of rocketing inequality, when the tax rates on the rich aren't keeping pace with the growth in their incomes. And none of that has shamed McCain into proposing policies that ease the burdens of the poor rather than increase the square footage of the yachts favored by the rich. Why should oil companies -- which don't need to be elected, and are fully accustomed to being hated -- prove any more sensitive to public opinion? 
