Tax Holidaze

Hilary Clinton and John McCain (now there’s a dinner-party duo you probably wouldn’t want to be seated between) have apparently proposed a federal gas tax “holiday” this summer so drivers can save the much-needed one dollar and eighty cents or so per fill-up, just enough to keep your average citizen from teetering off the brink of financial danger into outright economic collapse.

Cooler heads have pointed out the folly of this idea, which would eviscerate the already underfunded federal budget for road and transportation infrastructure repair, and Thomas Friedman, whose praises I generally don’t sing, has continued to beat his sensible drum for raising gas taxes, not lowering them, but by-and-large, and I guess not all that surprisingly, people are actually taking the gas-tax “holiday” proposal seriously, even though, to me, it sounds like something out of a late-night comedy talk show host’s opening monologue.

Presumably, if the plan really takes hold, we’ll be apt to see other such holidays, also strategically scheduled for maximum effectiveness in pandering to the basest and most-self-interested impulses of voters across the nation.

No doubt we’ll see a “sales-tax” holiday during the Christmas season, so people can save a few pennies at the mall while stocking up on plastic and Styrofoam from China for their families’ gifts; and we’ll probably get a “sin tax holiday” at New Year’s so smokers and drinkers can have a few extra pennies to spend on noisemakers for the big day; and certainly, we can look forward to an “income tax holiday” so that as April 15th rolls around, folks can turn their instant refund checks from the check-cashing places into much-needed commodities like fortified wine and department-store bicycles that much more quickly.

And why should we stop there? Why not just have holiday tax holidays? On Christmas, Easter, Independence Day, and Halloween, nobody pays any taxes! On Presidents’ Day, though, we do; pandering to them the way candidates for the job do all year long.