Is McCain Buying Votes with Gas Tax Plan? Do I Care If He Is?

Unless you have been hiding under a rock the past few days you have probably heard that Senator John McCain has proposed suspending the 18.4 cent per gallon federal gas tax this summer.

Now the news media is doing the "back and forth" tennis match with it. "Is it a good idea?" "Is it a bad idea?" Conservatives say it is putting money back into the pockets of the average American and that is good. Liberals say that it will cost the Federal government billions and that is bad.

Whichever side you take, it does appear that Senator McCain is blatantly trying to buy the good graces of the American voters here. The best part is he is not even using money out of his own pocket. He is using money out of our pockets. He is merely offering to leave it in our pockets. Genius! A pretty slick move. If no one goes along with him on Capital Hill, and let us face it they almost certainly will not, he can point a finger at his political foes, mostly Democrats, and say, "I was going to give this to the American people but they stopped me!" On the other hand, if the political elite do go along with the plan, they get almost no credit for it and McCain get all the glory. It is win-win for him either way.

To top it off, it is too late now for either of his Democratic presidential opponents to try anything similar. They would look like poor cousins trying to keep up. No, Senator McCain scored big points with this one.

But he is still trying to, in effect, "buy" the good graces of you and I the American voter. The question is, do we care? Normally I would get my hackles up over this. Normally. But these are not "normal" times. Not with the way big oil companies have been blatantly gauging the American people for three years now and the government has been standing by and allowing it. There is a big part of me that says, "Hey, I am glad to see someone in government doing something, anything, even if I know he has an ulterior motive for doing it."

The liberals are screaming about how much "this will cost the federal government." Excuse me? Cost the government? How so? It is not their money to begin with, it is our money. The feds take it from us and then blow it on programs which most of us never see any value from. I make less than $30,000 a year at my regular job and my wife makes just over it. We do not have money to throw away. I feed the homeless one Saturday a month with my church and help with the homebound but I do not have money to give away for some program I have never heard of somewhere I have never been.

The federal government could use a little "belt tightening." My family has had to do it often enough as gas and food prices have continued to rise while our paychecks have not budged in years. Maybe if they have to take a hit on gas money it will encourage congress to get busy and do something about the prices at the pump. So I say, go for it Senator McCain. I may not support why you are doing what you are doing but I support what you are doing.