Is your vote worth 18 cents? Indiana, North Carolina speak up.

The title of this post is not a joke, it’s a serious question. It’s a question that I’m not asking, Senators McCain and Clinton are asking it. It’s a cheap polispeak bid to buy your vote for as little as possible.

Now it’s being packaged really nicely. Lots of bluster, with claims of a summer long holiday or an attack on big business. It’s a cute claim that if you vote for X Congress will suddenly get shocked from their slumber and force the price of gasoline down. And I have a bridge to sell you too.

I will give Senator John McCain a bit of credit here. He came up with the idea and started to sell it before Clinton even noticed it was an issue. But there is no doubt that Senator Clinton noticed the positive polling McCain received and jumped on the bandwagon. I will give Senator Obama credit as well for not going along for the ride.

Now lets assume for a moment that this ‘gas holiday’ actually happened. Yeah! You get to save about .30 cents a day, or $27 over the summer. If you went to see Iron Man, plan to see The Incredible Hulk, WANTED, Indian Jones or any other summer movie you spent all the savings. That’s just seeing one of those films. Short holiday huh?

Of course when you add up all the people ‘saving’ money you can quickly get into the tens of millions of dollars or more. And every dime of that money will be sucked out of the roads in your particular state. Hope you like potholes and closed roads. How much more gas do you use to go through a detour? Still think McCain and Clinton are doing you a favor?

Now let’s get back to reality. This will never pass. I say that because this is not the first time this has been suggested. It never passed before, and it won’t now. Because the roads have to be driveable and open. And if the taxes are lost from the pump, you are guaranteed to pay for it elsewhere. So the real question is what do you want to be taxed on.

As for the idea of taking the profit from Oil companies, hurrah America is now a socialist nation. Because only socialists, and their economic cousins communists, believe that the government knows how much money you should make. And if you think that Democrats and Congress voting to increase the taxes of everyone making $31,850 or more is 2-faced, wait till they say that your business exceeded the profit for your industry and takes away all your money. You made a better mousetrap, made millions and employed thousands – but you went over the cap and so you made $100,000 while the government took your $10 million to spend on a study on whether or not the spotted owl is surviving. Doesn’t that feel good?

Of course we have left out the other part of stealing the money of companies, the economy. As the government takes money from all corporations, yes even your small business – just like they promised to raise the taxes of just the ‘rich’ – they have less money to invest into research (they fired half the R&D departments since the cash wasn’t there and they need reserves for a bad economy, loans from banks to buy new equipment, and bonds that are out), to put into retirement funds (kiss that 1-for-1 contribution to your 401K goodbye), mergers are too expensive (so much for your mutual funds and stocks). Since growth is low as are interest rates foreign investments pull out of the nation the dollar drops and things get really expensive.

And that’s just what I can foresee. Imagine what a real economist can tell you. And if you think I’m wrong just sit and think of all the things connected to corporate profits and/or the federal gas tax. It won’t take long to get numbers in the billions falling away, being spent by a government that hasn’t balanced it’s checkbook in my lifetime and runs every aspect of it’s operations about as well as your local DMV on a really good day.

And the Senators know all this. They know the arguments and have seen the projections. They know the Congressmen and women. They already counted the votes. So they know it will never happen, but it sounds great and makes people think they care, as long as no one stops to think it through.

Of course I don’t expect better from Senator Clinton. She tends to think the public is either dumb or forgetful. Because it was only early this year she promised to use the money from big oil to pay for healthcare. And she is used to making empty promises, like telling upstate New York she will create 200,000 jobs (after 7 years there still hasn’t been one made on her watch, but 30,000 have been lost – great management there). Or there is the wonderful campaign promise she made that would give every child in America $5,000 for college the day they were born. Amazing that she stopped talking about that once people (including me) asked where the money for that would come from, what happens to the money for those that don’t go to college, or does that include children that are illegal aliens. But that kind of polispeak got her headlines and votes, which was the real reason for the offer to buy your vote.

So considering this I ask voters in Indiana and North Carolina, is your vote worth 18 cents?