You’ve got to hand it to Governor Newsom: he knows how to take a straightforward problem and come up with a “solution” that is simultaneously self-serving, overly-complicated and unnecessarily expensive.
We can all agree that gasoline prices are too high and exacting a toll on all of us – especially poor and blue collar residents. California’s fuel costs are the highest in the nation – $1.64 a gallon higher than the national average.
Republican legislators proposed providing relief with a six-month suspension of the state’s 51 cents-a-gallon gas tax. The gas tax brings in $6.8 billion a year, so a six-month gas tax holiday would cost the state about $3.5 billion – which would be backfilled from the state’s massive $45 to $68 billion.
Assembly Democrats voted against even having a vote on it.
READ: Bill To Suspend Gas Tax For 6 Months Killed In State Assembly On Party-Line Vote
Governor Newsom weirdly denounced the idea as putting money “in the pockets of oil companies” – even though gas tax revenues actually go into the pockets of the state bureaucracy. A gas tax holiday would that money would stay where it came from in the first place: the pockets of taxpayers.
But such a simple, direct policy would deprive Newsom of the opportunity to send money directly to voters…er, residents. In this case, $400 for each car an individual owns, up to a maximum of two cars (regardless of whether or how much you’re using both cars).
Newsom is running for re-election. Sure, he has no significant opponent, but he doubtless wants to run up the score and here is a chance to send envelopes with his name on it to millions of California voters, each letter containing as much as $800 in pre-loaded debit cards!
And Newsom’s approach comes at three times the cost of the gas tax holiday he denounced.
The Republican leadership’s solution provided relief from the gas tax in proportion to how much a person drives. Newsom’s approach is to shower voters with government largesse untethered to how much they’re actually on the road.
To be sure, Newsom also took pains to protect his environmental Left flank by also proposing letting people ride the bus for free for three months – because driving cars is bad but shackling yourself to the rigid schedule of a lumbering, LNG-powered behemoth is virtuous. Plus more funding for biking and walking trails – because there must be some nexus there somewhere with families having their household budgets gobbled up the nation’s highest gas prices.
We applaud Governor Newsom’s impulse to provide relief Californians relief from skyrocketing gas prices. But rather than throwing other people’s money at the problem, he should tackle the underlying state tax and regulatory policies that are fueling the problem.
