I was amazed to find the editors of the Washington Post complaining about Democratic politicians “pandering”:
Facing potential Democratic losses in this year’s midterm elections, the Biden administration has already tried one classic election-season gimmick, releasing oil from the national Strategic Petroleum Reserve in a desperate attempt to ease gas prices. Now several Democratic senators want to step up the pandering, proposing to suspend the federal gas tax through the end of the year.
In fact, they should head in the opposite direction.
Their motivation is as obvious as it is imprudent. Inflation is among the biggest issues heading into this November’s vote. Gas prices are up about a dollar year over year. By suspending the 18.4 cent-per-gallon gas tax, Democrats can make it look as though they are restraining high prices. By making the suspension temporary, they can also claim that the tax break is merely an emergency measure to see the country through extraordinary supply shocks.
Yet, unlike in other parts of the economy experiencing high inflation, supply problems are neither novel nor rare in the oil market. Every time gas prices spike, and politicians roll out some ploy to seem to be addressing the issue, the culprit is typically a supply issue: a war in Libya, say, or a hurricane in Louisiana. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries exercises cartel price-setting power, which makes it even harder for supply to respond to demand when disruptions occur. Politicians can declare — and have declared, over and over again — that spiking gas prices reflect exigent circumstances that require temporary relief. In this case, that temporary relief would cost the treasury about $20 billion.
The fact that this relief would terminate at the end of the year, right after the midterm elections, reveals the politics behind the proposal. Yet the only thing worse than a temporary suspension would be a permanent one.
Pandering is what politicians do. Did they think that claims of commitment to opposing global warming through reducing our use of fossil fuels were sincere? Could they possibly be that naïve? Politicians who actually get elected inevitably develop a hierarchy of values and at the very tippy-top of that hierarchy is saying whatever is necessary to get elected. That’s not just true of Democrats. It’s true of all politicians of whatever party who actually get elected.
The democrats are more invested in the game of pandering than the opposition parties. The kiss-ups range from lip service promises, divisive identity politics, to reversals of policies – ones that were successful in a former administration — in order to satisfy the rantings of magical thinking followers.
The example of oil policies is but one of Dems delusional ideas posited to “help†the public. Compounding the bad idea of releasing oil reserves or briefly eliminating gasoline taxes is Biden’s dismemberment of the keystone pipeline project, Alaskan oil drilling, while giving a thumbs up to Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and then begging for more oil to be released by the Saudis, to make up for our loss of energy independence under the Biden regime. It makes no sense at all!