National Review
On the menu today: Joe Biden contradicts Energy secretary Jennifer Granholm on whether suspending the federal gas tax will hurt the government’s ability to pay for infrastructure projects; and the president who said of Putin, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power!” wants his secretaries of State and Defense to stop being so provocative and antagonistic toward Russia in their public remarks. We’re in the very best of hands, America.
Whom Does Joe Biden Listen To?
This week, the White House curiously tried to roll out a proposal for a federal and state gas-tax holiday that senior administration officials had been downplaying and dismissing just a few days earlier.
Part of the challenge with the gas tax, of course, is that it funds the roads. And we just did a big infrastructure bill to help fund the roads. So, if we do — if we remove the gas tax, that takes away the funding that was just passed by Congress to be able to do that. So that’s one of the challenges, but I’m not saying that that’s off the table. That is — as prices continue to rise, it’s certainly something the administration is considering, just like I know governors across the country are considering that.
But then Tuesday, Biden said to reporters, “It’s not going to be impact on major road construction and major repairs. . . . Is it going to, in fact, make it difficult to maintain our roads? The answer is: We have plenty of capacity to do that.”
Suspending the federal gas tax for three months would eliminate around $10 billion in federal revenues. That’s a sizable chunk of the roughly $48 billion the U.S. spends on highways in a typical year. The $10 billion figure may seem small in the context of the $1.2 trillion in spending in the big infrastructure bill, but that’s not the kind of money that can be found in the federal petty-cash drawer or behind the seat cushions in the Oval Office. And remember, every infrastructure project is going to cost significantly more than expected because of high prices for diesel fuel, oil (which is used to make asphalt), concrete, steel, and so on — and that’s not even getting into the issue of labor shortages.
(The editors of NR call suspending the gas tax “a bad idea and the wrong policy” because it’s attacking the wrong problem. Gas prices aren’t high because the taxes are too high — well, maybe they are in California. They’re high because of increasing demand, federal policies designed to discourage investment in fossil fuels, and a sudden decrease in refinery capacity, because companies are turning several of their oil refineries into biofuel-processing plants.
When Biden formally proposed the gas-tax holiday in his prepared remarks on Wednesday, he said, “What I’m proposing is suspending the federal gas tax without affecting the Highway Trust Fund. And here’s how we do that: With the tax revenues up this year and our deficit down over $1.6 trillion this year alone, we’ll still be able to fix our highways and bring down prices of gas. We can do both at the same time.”
Biden is correct that federal tax revenues are higher than…
