-By Warner Todd Huston
Talks between the White House and GOP leaders in the House of Representatives are on everyone’s mind and solutions and ideas are coming fast and thick from many corners of Washington. But CNN thinks it has the way to fix it all: raise the gas tax.
Dishonestly portraying “some experts” as offering a new fix to the fiscal cliff, CNN explored the idea of hiking the federal gas tax because, CNN says, the current 18.4 cents per gallon is “not enough.”
“As lawmakers race to negotiate a deal to avoid the fiscal cliff,” CNN urgently reports, “some experts say one tax increase should be on the table: a gas tax hike.”
The tax, that raises $32 billion a year, hasn’t been raised since 1993, CNN tells us. This is just not enough to serve our needs, CNN reports “an expert” as saying.
“Establishing a sustainable resource base for transportation needs to be part of any grand bargain,” said Emil Frankel, a former transportation expert in the George W. Bush administration and now director of transportation policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “In the short run, raising the gas tax is the best way to do that.”
This is a cynical faux news report, for sure. After all, these “experts” have for years been saying that the gas tax needs to be hiked, so this discussion is not tied to “fiscal cliff” talks at all. Essentially, there is nothing new in this gas tax debate.
Yet, CNN portrays this as a new aspect to the fiscal cliff talks. It just isn’t.
There has been talk of hiking the gas tax, granted. Most recently, the 2010 Simpson-Bowles debt reduction plan proposed a 15 cent-a-gallon hike in the gas tax in order to cut into the current shortfall in Transportation spending.
CNN relates the other proposals to raise the gas tax, of course, but all this has been a continuing discussion, one going on for years, and has no connection specifically to the fiscal cliff talks or even the reason we got here… except for one thing.
That one thing is exactly the thing that CNN doesn’t bother bringing up in what is this, an advocacy piece for tax hikes as opposed to a news report. That one thing is a cut in spending.
Every “solution” CNN reports in this piece is but one form or another of raising taxes. Not once is there a mention of cutting spending.
The truth is that Washington doesn’t have a tax problem. It has a spending problem and unless cuts in spending become part of the fiscal cliff talks, there aren’t any serious “solutions” in the offing.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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