The road to Pennsylvania Ave. leads right through… our pockets?

Monday, April 28, 2008 6:12 PM by Mark Murray

Hillary Clinton is calling for a holiday on the 18.4-cent gasoline tax, and she says she’d make up the funding from that (which funds transportation infrastructure) by taxing oil company’s “windfall” profits…

Here’s what Clinton said at her October 8, 2000 debate with Lazio: “[O]ne of my fundamental disagreements during this campaign with my opponent was when he called for the repeal of the gas tax. Now, the gas tax is one of those few taxes that New York actually gets more money from Washington than we send. And we are totally reliant on it to do things like finishing I-86 in the Southern Tier, or the fast- ferry harbor works up in Rochester, as well as the work we need to do here in the city. So you can count on me to support infrastructure.”

And here’s a June 28, 2000 Newsday clip: “Campaigning in the Hudson Valley, Lazio continued a two-day assault on Clinton’s support of maintaining the 18-cent federal gas tax and then used tough rhetoric to declare that ‘trust’ and ‘character’ were campaign issues during an evening fundraiser in Manhattan that raised more that $1 million. Clinton, meanwhile, lashed out at Lazio’s plan to repeal 4.3 cents of the gas tax, calling it ‘a bad deal for New York and a potential bonanza for the oil companies.’”

“During a visit to a shopping mall in the Buffalo suburbs, Clinton said that ‘the gas tax is one of the few exceptions where we actually get more money back than we send to Washington.’”

So not only does McCain call for a suspension of the tax, but now Hillary does too! Transportation infrastructure which is already underfunded here in the US is now at risk of losing a large contributor. This exposes another danger in that if the difference is not made up, not only does the environment suffer and the American public left at a worse position to deal with inevitable rise in oil prices, but now transportation infrastructure will suffer as well with the potential to compound the environmental problem due to innefficiencies and congestion in transportation infrastructure which cannot be corrected or remedied because of lack of funds. This is all aside from the obviously needed maintenance on our roadways which seems to be [at best] lacking.

I can only hope that Obama doesn’t cave in to peer pressure on this one. It would be a shame for every candidate to support this measure simply to gain votes or level the playing field. Even Bush has enough common sense to be wary of this suspension of the tax (Though it is most likely due to his love affair with oil comapnies and his knowing that the taxes suspended on gas will need to be made up from somewhere, putting said oil companies at risk of being taxed more)

I’m all for taxing oil companies windfall profits, but lets do so in tandem with continuing the needed gas tax to help ween this country off of our addiction to oil.

On a side note, it’s cute how Clintoln ‘flip-flops’ from praising the tax on fuel to renouncing it.