The Homa Files

What about the budget impact?
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Following on to yesterday’s post…

Team Biden has floated the idea of waiving the 18.4-cents-a-gallon federal tax on gasoline through the end of the year.

Bloomberg’s assessment: A gas tax holiday would do nothing to fight inflation but would do lasting harm to the federal budget.

Yesterday we drilled down on the inflation effect, concluding that:

Based on common sense behavioral economics, temporarily waiving the gas tax is a play “at the margins” that is likely to have a minimal effect in curbing inflation at the pumps.

Today, let’s look at the budget effect…

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Again, building on the Bloomberg headline…

Keep in mind that revenue from the gas tax ostensibly goes into the Highway Trust Fund, which is the primary way the U.S. pays for repairing and maintaining highways

It is estimated that suspending the tax through the end of 2022 (as the proposed Dem-sponsored bill envisions) would cost about $20 billion).

Hmm.

Didn’t the Feds recently pass a bipartisan infrastructure bill intended, in part, to repair roads & bridges?

Specifically, $110 billion was earmarked and split roughly 50-50 for roads & bridges.

For details,see: What  is in the bipartisan infrastructure bill?

So, jacking $20 billion from the highways budget is the equivalent of cutting the infrastructure bill’s commitment to roads by about 40%.

So much for the commitment to infrastructure rebuilding.

They’re not trying to snooker us again, are they?

This entry was posted on February 24, 2022 at 7:28 am and is filed under Bidenomics, Gas Prices, inflation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.