It’s an old pol gimmick: Putting a check in voters’ hands in an election year dramatically improves the odds that they’ll vote for you. But apparently few voters are buying the lame $100 gas rebate idea floated by Senate Republicans, according to a New York Times article. Aides are fielding phone calls from angry constituents, and conservative talk show hosts came down hard:
“What kind of insult is this?” fumed Rush Limbaugh on his radio program. “Instead of buying us off and treating us like we’re a bunch of whores, just solve the problem.”
Give voters some credit for recognizing pandering when they see it.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
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20 Comments
Lame. Knee jerk. Waste of time.
Yep..sounds like the US Congress as a whole. The main “work product” out of that organization for the past few years has been recognition by making official cheese day or some such.
It’s nice to be appreciated:
Cuckoos of Many Different Muted Colors… Lin Petro, Mike McDermid, Ed Friedemann, Arthur Flynn, Nancy Gee, Mahmood Kayani, Ghulam Muhammad, Otis G. Barlow (from abroad) readily spring to mind. …www.arabnews.com/?page=9§ion=0& article=62552&d=22&m=4&y=2005 – 55k – Cached – Similar pages
Arab News
Where is Red Foreman when you need him? Somebody has to stand up and say what a DUMBASS idea this is.
I hope they get stuck in a nasty fight with their fellow Republicans in the House. It is rather amusing watching the GOP Senators scramble for cover.
raptor,
‘Official cheese day.’ Too funny, and a nice encapsulation of our do-nothing GOP Congress.
Ok, up front: Congress is running scared, amok really, terrified that come November Americans will hold incumbents responsible for US energy policy and its horrific costs (in dollars and blood).
So they’re obviously looking to buy votes. Period.
That said, it’s not that lame. The $100 comes from a Frist staffer’s calculation that Americans on average pay $11/mo. in federal gasoline taxes.
The $100, then, is a refund of 9 months’-worth of federal gasoline taxes. Senate Republicans didn’t like the Democrat plan, which was to just end the tax. Why? They were rightfully concerned that gasoline retailers wouldn’t pass the roughly $0.185/gal. tax on to consumers (in other words, they worried that retailers would not lower the price by 18+ cents but would instead keep it for themselves).
The real questions here are:(1) Democrats look dumb again. Why? Can there be any of their feet left now to shoot off?(2) Why do Congressional Republicans continue to hold Dick Cheney’s and Big Oil’s water? If gasoline retailers, who may not be the same people who own/manage Big Oil, refuse to back the unit price of gasoline off by the unit amount of the tax, then let Americans see them for what they are – and let the US move away from fossil fuels and into something less supportive of Islamofascist terror all the faster. Instead, Republicans choose to get their feet ventilated by Dick Cheney’s energy policy and Big Oil and its distributors.
The Senate GOP plan will do a far better job of actually refunding gasoline taxes than will the Senate Democrats’ plan. In other words, come November you can choose your good panderers or your dumb panderers – but panderers is what you’ll get.
…if you vote for incumbents, that is: vote incumbent and you are very likely voting for a panderer of one stripe or another.
Listening to the Limbaugh show sucks surely, because I’ve never done it. Ever.
He’s no arbiter of correct politics at all. Pant load, blow hard and drug addict. He’s a gimmick.
Whatever Senators are doing, who cares, their function is broken because votes along party lines constantly isn’t good balance.
What America feared having the same party in power in Congress, controlling both Houses and the White House has been a detriment to this country.
Flike–you’re ignoring one important distinction. Taxes are paid by the people who buy gas.
Rebates are given to everybody with a heartbeat.
I get a rebate if I only take mass transit or if I drive a Hummer.
I remember getting a rebate from GW already once . . . right before the national debt skyrocketed to a historic high (as a percentage of GDP) and never looked back.
Who gives a flying fig either way about $100? That falls into the noise of my annual spending. It comes to less than $2.00/week..can’t even by a soda and burger once a week at McDonald’s for that.
Frankly, the independent station owner or franchiser makes practically nothing on gasoline sales…I’d be happy to donate my annual $100 to him. Better yet, put my $100 into a fund for educational infrastructure or for transportation infrastructure. Or perhaps use it to fund a foreign aid program that really makes a difference to the poor of the world. America only wins the battle against terrorism when it wins the battle for the hearts of those in the rest of the world.
Rebates are given to everybody who filed a federal tax return. I don’t think it takes a genius to figure out that that’ll cover everybody who drives, especially in red-state America.
And consumption taxes ended do not imply that unit prices will be lowered by the unit tax amount.
The Democrat plan was naive at best, but stupid probably covers it.
Just politicans trying to buy votes. Wonder how many they will get for $100.
And then we’d pay tax on the rebate come April 15, right?
Sheesh…
regarding flike’s comments about the Democrats looking dumb over this…
I’m sort of sitting here scratching my head about that one. This was proposed first by a Dem, but the Frist proposal got much more media play, thus it was associated with the fascists and now they are the ones taking heat, not Dems.
What are we entitled to?
I had not heard of this Dem plan to end the federal gas tax. Flikes post was the first I knew of it. So much for the “liberal media”.
This Dem plan is ironically just what Conservative vomit spewer Sean Hannity is currently demanding! Ending the federal gas tax. Interesting he did not mention the Dems trying to do it.
But I agree that the Dem plan was naive.Goodhearted but naive. And not addressing of the infrastructure the Fed gas tax pays for.
The GOP spin on the plan is a try at buying votes pure and simple. Proof again how the GOP can take a “good” idea and pervert it.
lawrenceliberal, if the Dems proposed rebating gasoline taxes before the Republicans (and before they proposed ending it altogether), then I must stand corrected.
But if they proposed to do it the right way (rebates guarantee gas taxes get back into the pockets of taxpayers while ending the gasoline tax will surely mean it’s claimed by gasoline retailers, given the demand elasticity of gasoline w.r.t. price) – if the Dems proposed “doing it” correctly, then why did they change their minds and propose instead a FUBAR version?
Because if that is indeed what happened then I’m calling QED (note that it was not necessary even to mention flip flop at this point). ;)
I gotta tell you, though, that I am not having much luck coming up with a link showing that the Dems switched from gasoline tax rebates to gasoline tax abolition.
My mind is open, though; can you help?
Two questions:
When will democrats stop holding hostage the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge? The largest oil reserve in North America sits underneath it and we can’t touch it.
The oil companies say the problem is refining capacity. At what price per gallon do the economics of adding refining capacity finally make sense?
I still think back to an Art Buchwald column from my high school days, where he predicted a time when Kansas farmers would live like Arab sheiks when the world converted to ethanol.Why don’t we just tell all these damn evil Texans to just shut the **** up and do it?
Uh Mr. C, KANSAS farmers will not be the winners in the ethanol race. Maybe farmers in states with more water, but not here in kansas.
Ethanol is a net USER of energy, not a net producer. It is produced by using grains that dont grow well in kansas without irrigation. And ethanol production requires huge amounts of water.
Also, the ethanol mash byproduct is fed to cattle to lower the cost of production. Those feedlots and packing plants will soon be going away along with the water out here.
We dont have the WATER for ethanol Mr. C. That is why ethanol is not the savior for kansas, especially WESTERN kansas.