NO! Bad Bush! Bad!

Bush said rising gas prices are "...like a tax on the working people." That's so obviously dead wrong, that it requires a C student to utter or accept.

Taxes go to government, which in turn will (in theory) provide services to taxpayers, or in more socialist governments, give the money to poor people.

Whether or not you agree with socialism, this is totally different from the money going to oil companies and Arab dictators and monarchs, who give little if anything back to low- and middle-class US citizens.

As always, Bush ignores the plight of working people, and doesn't have the decency to stop the rhetoric. Of course, neither do the other "same-old same-olds", Hillary or McCain.

But what's really sad about the stupid "proposals" by McCain and Clinton is how little this populist tactic would do, because gas prices are rising faster than their little "tax holiday" savings. 18.4 cents per gallon? Regular gas prices have gone up over twice as much in the past month, over $0.50 a gallon since Christmas and $0.67 from a year ago ("reformulated retail" prices from the Department of Energy *).

Obama is right on this matter. There's no point in messing with this tax. The real problem is the climbing gas price, and the only way to help "the working people" is by switching off of cars that use massive amounts of petroleum. As far as I'm concerned, keep the tax on gasoline to pay for highways and bridges. Then use Clinton's idea to collect $6 billion from oil companies and give it as a subsidy to the first US car maker to churn out a huge fleet of cheaper and cleaner cars. Good for American economy, innovation and manufacturing competitiveness, union jobs, the environment. Everyone wins. Well, except for Exxon Mobil, the Saudis, and our best friends, the Iranians. If we're lucky, Iraqis might even notice this threat to the value of their single national resource and get their act together.


* Interesting thing I wanted to post-script: when you look at the data you see a clear trend by the market to make the price soar instantly (well, at most over the course of a week, since the data was weekly rather than daily). This is usually accompanied by a return (or near-return) to previous prices over a period of one to two months). For example, a $0.60 spike is seen one week, then five or six weeks of $0.10 decreases are seen. The loser in these cases seems to always be citizens and small businesses, since larger businesses can usually weather these temporary increases, buying their fuel in bulk. The general public is, of course, unable to purchase store and store to 20 gallons they might need to weather the storm, and the extra we pay is going to someone who the market clearly doesn't think (based on the eventual return to normal) deserve it. Makes you wonder who is in charge of gas prices, and if they are the beneficiaries of this, doesn't it?