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Gas Tax Holiday Nonsense
It's utter irrelevance to consumers notwithstanding, what irks me the most about the Gas Tax Holiday proposed by John McCain and Hillary Clinton is how it so perfectly embodies the conservative view that all tax (and all government) is bad. Any time a politician has a chance to show his profound disregard for the federal government by cutting funding, whether with tax cuts to the rich or just cutting off funds for highway maintenance for a few months, no one even brings up how these funding cuts affect programs or the people charged with carrying out those policies. We don't even think about why those tax monies and highway maintenance programs were instituted in the first place. Rather, we have all swallowed the conservative Kool-Aid - the federal government and its programs have no value. Cutting tax funds is always good.
But just imagine how disrupting and demoralizing this would be to those responsible for highways. Already seriously strapped for resources, with our nation's roads clearly in decline, somehow our federal highway administrators are supposed to adapt to a $9 billion deficit for the summer. No problem. They can just do without, become more efficient, layoff a few thousand of those do-nothing road-workers, suspend a few of those stupid safety programs, wait until fall to fix those roads.... The gas tax holiday is a stupid idea based on stupid notions that ignore the purpose of government and would do real harm, which is to say, it is a perfect conservative policy proposal.
Now exactly what Hillary Clinton is doing promoting such boilerplate conservative stupidity is beyond me.
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