ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, May 4, 1996 TAG: 9605060015
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
BOB DOLE just can't get a break.
Here the Democrats have a lovely campaign issue in the minimum wage, which they're using to beat the Republicans over the head as the party of the elite, as opposed to congressional Democrats who are in there slugging it out for the working people.
Then the price of gasoline jumps. Eureka! An issue the GOP and its presidential hopeful just might be able to make work for them in a similar fashion.
After all, the truisms go: "All politics is local" and "people vote their pocketbooks." It's hard to imagine anything more immediate and with more direct impact on the billfold than the cost of filling up the minivan to haul the kids around town.
Such a plump political peach was ripe for the picking, but Dole hardly had plucked it before it started to look a little squishy. The Senate majority leader wrote to the president proposing repeal of the 4.3-cent federal surcharge on gasoline, and he and House Speaker Newt Gingrich promised a vote by Memorial Day. The Clinton administration, ever sensitive to political breezes, said it would consider repeal - though the surcharge was passed in 1993 as part of the president's deficit-reduction package, and the deficit, while indeed reduced, has not disappeared.
But first Clinton ordered the sale of 12 million barrels of oil from the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve to try to force prices down. This hardly flooded a market that sops up 70 million barrels a day. And the Justice Department announced an investigation into oil-company pricing practices.
What a lot of hooey from all sides.
Gasoline prices surged because demand exceeded supply. Petroleum refiners, like many U.S. companies, have cut operating costs by switching to just-in-time inventory strategies, exposing them more to the ups and downs of the price of crude. Because the winter was colder and longer than usual, the refineries produced heating oil longer than usual, then quickly had to buy crude for gasoline production. And a host of world events had an impact on oil prices, from drawn-out talks about lifting some sanctions against Iraq to storms in the North Sea.
The price already appears to be heading down. But politicians undoubtedly will try to get continued mileage out of the situation. Wherever voters are mad, there will be politicians leaping to offer supposed fixes - Democrat and Republican alike.
What neither political party will say is what Americans do not want to hear. Even at its highest, the price of gasoline in the United States is lower than almost anywhere else in the world. It is too low - creating perverse incentives against alternative modes of transportation and failing to come close to covering gas-guzzling's costs to the nation.
Despite recent wails of protest, The Wall Street Journal reports, "Americans are buying bigger cars, driving them greater distances and, with repeal of the national 55-mile-an-hour speed limit, driving them faster, too."
Both Dole's proposal on the gas tax and Clinton's response are irresponsible and cynical. Sad to say, they almost surely foreshadow more vote-buying attempts to come.
LENGTH: Medium: 61 linesby CNB