Gas-tax holiday? Good politics, bad policy.

Everyone wants to see the price at the pump drop to a buck a gallon, but it's just not gonna happen. Ever. Those happy, halcyon days are long over. But, in the truest example of political we've seen yet in this topsy-turvy campaign season, two of the three remaining candidates are proposing a summer-long break from federal taxes at the pump, with only Senator Obama opposing the plan. There's just one tiny problem ... it won't do a bit of good.

I know hearing "tax cut" (or in this case, tax "holiday") is music to the ears, but haven't you noticed how whenever Clinton or McCain talk about it, they talk about a "total savings" for "all Americans" without once mentioning how much of that "windfall" you or your family can expect to line your pockets? The math is elementary, so why aren't they telling you the numbers? Well, because the numbers reveal what a silly and ineffective plan they've concocted.

Look, the federal gas tax is only 14.3 cents a gallon; it's not like it's a dollar-fifty or something. If you're an average American (with a 13 gallon tank that gets sucked bone dry once a week), this three-month tax break will save you a paltry $22.31, stretched over 12 weeks. Just $1.86 per fill-up.

Now if you driver a bigger car, and you drive a lot more, the math favors you a bit more. Say you have a 20-gallon tank and you fill up twice week. You'd save $2.86 per fill-up, or $5.72 a week, for a three-month total of $68.64. While 69 bucks in three months might feel a little weightier in your wallet than 22 dollars in the same period, two facts remain: most American's are in the 22 dollar group, and those who aren't still aren't going to see a huge savings compared to their overall gas bill. Where I live, gas is around 3.50 a gallon. Dropping that price for three months to 3.36 a gallon just won't make a difference. And don't forget, many states have tried this sort of holiday before, passing the losses on to the oil companies so the states didn't lose any revenue. The result? Gas prices went up to cover the cost. Good plan, guys.

The distressing part of all this is that all three candidates know the gas-tax holiday is just a red herring, meant to distract voters from the fact that, at present, there simply is no solution to the ever-increasing gas prices. After all, the math is simple, as I just showed you, and I'm sure Senators McCain and Clinton could dig up a calculator somewhere (okay, maybe an abacus for McCain), but they don't want to. It's much easier, and often more politically expedient, to pretend they have an answer than to admit there isn't one. By the way, for any political novices who read this, this is what we call "pandering" ... it's when you tell the voters what you know they want to hear even when you understand it's neither a good nor workable idea.

It's like how Senator Clinton tells voters in Iowa she's gonna commit a majority of the government's "alternative fuels" budget to ethanol but then she tells Pennsylvania that she will do the same for clean coal. Just one problem: you can't give 51% (majority) of the money to one cause and another 51% to another cause, unless we're using some new age math that no one has heard of yet. (There are actually bigger problems, too. Like that we consume more oil producing ethanol than we save by using it. Or like how clean coal is a misnomer. There's no such thing as clean coal, it's all a matter of how the waste is disposed of, not whether or not the waste is created. So if we take the harmful emissions from burning coal out of the air, we still have to put them somewhere ... it's basic physics.)

But instead of finding real solutions to these problems, some politicians prefer to lie to you and tell you everything will be rosy, even though they know the math tells us otherwise. Thank goodness the rest of us know how to use a calculator.