Let the Gas Tax Expire September 30.

If I'm getting this right, Keynesians think now is not the time to go tight on the budget because if we want to stimulate the economy into building up some self-sustaining momentum, you need to have all the "extra" money you can circulating in the mix, short of just printing up some more and tossing that into the game (nod to Rick Perry).

I can see both sides of that one: if we don't get serious now about runaway expenses, when we're poised on the brink of a retiring demographic that has never heard, "Enough already", then when will we find a time for balance? If we pretend we're going to keep promises we can't keep today, when will the change really come? If this isn't the bottom yet, how far deeper into a hole can we dig ourselves? (etc.)

Still,
tightening the belt now, on hungry people (and I'm not talking about the traditional poor here, who are being artificially bulked up with free food coupons, at least temporarily) makes no sense. Hungry people being defined as those currently stagnating, perhaps, underachieving, underemployed, and underutilized in introducing innovative programs that are small and local and can be built into bigger methods of remaking bureaucratic aims (and delivering more effectively too -- think the education field, if we really admitted failure and opened that one up to innovation...).

To me,
the high gas prices -- the trickle-down budgeting chaos that induced fear in business and household budgets all across the nation -- helped lead us to this fearful, insecure state the country can't seem to get out of.

If you limit mobility, if you make people spend more just to get to jobs, if you lock them into their current properties via the housing market, if you make less and less incentive for them to take additional jobs if it means significant additional travel, if you up the costs of recreation and tourism and the final price of shipped goods from groceries to frac sand ... you get the idea on how the per gallon price has contributed to already wary businesses and households, when decided how much disposable cash they have to inject into the economy, or what "risks" or chances they are willing to incur if there's that added per mile surcharge...

I know the status quo people, those who travel little by road and are locked into their own already developed patterns and places, are not affected here. That's a lot of policymakers, politicians and pundits, I might venture, who don't see how the high gas prices really do affect psychologies and personal choices.

Sure, we all want to save the planet. We all want safe roads and upgraded infrastructure.

But I have to go back and ask: Now? Really, now is the time to continue building the tax funds via an additional 18.4 cents a gallon, which hit the most independently mobile the hardest of all? Again, it's like eating our young, penalizing our most ambitious societal movers who like the local independence that not committing to cross-country flights or someone else's train schedule permits.

Come September 30, once the kids and the teachers are back in school, let the 18.4 cents-a-gallon tax expire. If the economy needs dollars back in the pockets of consumers who will spend them elsewhere, back in the budgets of businesses -- not the large service corporations, but the local over-the-road shippers and travellers -- then this seems to be a no-brainer to me.

What drives the economy more than the people getting out there and mixing it up everyday, with real people and transporting real products? The technology revolution is well and fine, but the meat-and-potatoes persons really could use a break at the pump.

There will be plenty of time to penalize them later, when the economy has been given a push-start and perhaps is back rolling again...


ADDED:

When state taxes are added in, Americans pay, on average, about 43 cents per gallon in taxes — or about one-eighth the total price at the pump. ... Though opponents will inevitably rail about taking money from the pockets of Americans in recessionary times, using gas-tax receipts on public investment puts that money right back into the economy. ...

The real problem is, that money is then passed through the hands of various levels of bureaucracy. The money that goes in as taxes, doesn't come out equally in the actually building projects and price-per-gallon re-investment back in the communities.

I trust local drivers, people who better know the value of a buck -- or 18.3 cents per mile even -- more than I trust the federal and state (and county, in some cases) governments will invest that money wisely right now. Put it back in the pockets of the people who are out and about every day, and see what happens?

Surely it can't be worse than maintaining the status quo, and accepting what's happening out there now as stimulating the economy. Desperate times call for smart actions -- not more of what has proven not to provide incentives and has actually decimated the middle class in the past. Where have we heard this before?

... And ways can be found to cushion the blow for poorer and middle-class workers who depend on their cars by providing off-setting tax breaks through the earned income tax credit.
...
The Simpson-Bowles commission on budget reform urged an immediate 15 cent-per-gallon increase; former Senators Bill Bradley of New Jersey and John Danforth of Missouri have suggested a $1 increase to be phased in between now and 2020.
...
President Obama should press to extend the tax now. And he should start explaining why — for the sake of the economy, the environment and a functioning transportation system — this tax will need to rise. >

And don't let the realities of that lousy economy stand in your way, eh?