The Democrats gas tax holiday fiasco

 Washington Post/Bloomberg:

...

Unfortunately, that includes a proposal by a group of Democratic senators to waive the 18.4-cents-a-gallon federal tax on gasoline through the end of the year — an idea that would do nothing to fight inflation but would do lasting harm to the federal budget.

Revenue from the gas tax goes into the Highway Trust Fund, which is the primary way the U.S. pays for surface transportation. A critical weakness of this system is that the tax was never indexed to inflation; it’s been stuck at the same level since President Bill Clinton’s first year in office. The result is that even as Americans have driven more and more miles by the year, the trust fund has been persistently eroded in real terms, leading to a series of emergency measures to stabilize it. It faces a shortfall of some $160 billion over the next decade.

A gas-tax holiday will only compound this problem. The cost of repairing and maintaining highways will rise along with inflation while the trust fund is depleted all the faster. By one estimate, suspending the tax through the end of the year (as the bill envisions) would cost about $20 billion, hasten the fund’s insolvency by a full year, and potentially even increase inflation by stimulating demand for other goods and services. Because it would also add to the demand for gas, it would likely push up pre-tax prices, thereby eliminating much of the consumer benefit and potentially contributing to higher energy costs more generally. Drivers might save a grand total of $2 a week.

...

The problem is not the gas tax.  It is Biden's anti-energy policies that have reduced the supply of oil and gas that has the results of increasing the price and adding to the inflationary pressure on just getting goods to market through the supply chain.  Neither Biden are the Democrats have an answer to the problem they caused.  They want to pretend that they can reduce the supply of oil and gas and "save the environment" while destroying the economy and pushing worthless wind and solar.  They are not only driving up the cost of transportation, they are also driving up the cost of farmers producing food.  Agriculture requires the use of fossil fuels to operate machinery and produce fertilizer for growing crops.  

There appears to be no intelligent life in the Democrat party when it comes to fossil fuels nor in the boardrooms of major corporations that support this nonsense.  Climate change is one of the most overrated phenomena today.  Those who have predicted it have been serially wrong for 50 years.