Gas prices are reaching all-time highs and OPEC is cutting output, so Bush is getting a little nervous. Naturally, this means it’s time for Bush’s campaign to roll out the latest attack ad against John Kerry. This one’s titled, “Wacky.” (Really, that’s the name the campaign gave it.)
Some people have wacky ideas. Like taxing gasoline more so people drive less. That’s John Kerry. He supported a 50 cent a gallon gas tax. If Kerry’s tax increase were law, the average family would pay $657 more a year.
Raising taxes is a habit of Kerry’s. He supported higher gasoline taxes 11 times. Maybe John Kerry just doesn’t understand what his ideas mean to the rest of us.
The mendacity is overwhelming, but FactCheck.org did a fine job highlighting a couple of this ad’s most serious flaws.
Kerry’s support for a 50-cent-a-gallon increase in the gasoline tax happened a decade ago, back when regular was selling for a national average of $1.01 per gallon. Kerry’s support was so fleeting that the only evidence of it to surface so far are two old newspaper clips in which Kerry complains that he deserved more credit as a deficit-cutter. He never voted for, or sponsored, legislation to impose such a tax, and he doesn’t support one now, when the price is just under $1.76….
By saying that Kerry “supported higher gasoline taxes 11 times” this ad could give you the idea that Kerry voted for 11 different tax increases, which isn’t true. Actually, a close look at the Bush campaign’s own count shows that nine of the eleven were about a single increase. Five of those votes came in the maneuvering that led to a single 4.3-cent-per-gallon increase in 1993, as part of President Clinton’s economic package. Four more votes for “higher” taxes were actually cast against Republican attempts to repeal that same 4.3-cent increase in 1996, 1998 and 2000. (On one of those votes most Republicans voted against repeal, too.) The Bush campaign also counts a vote in 2000 against a proposal to suspend the federal gasoline tax entirely for six months — which left gasoline taxes unchanged, not “higher.” The 11th instance cited by the Bush campaign wasn’t a vote at all — just that Kerry quote from 1994 that he’d once supported a 50-cent increase.
Wait, it gets better.
It turns out N. Gregory Mankiw, the chairman of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors, recommended raising gasoline taxes 50 cents in 1999 (several years after Kerry mentioned it). This opens up a whole world of opportunities.
Whenever this issue comes up, Bush critics should levy the following, carefully-worded charge:
It’s not bad enough that Bush has sat by and watched gas prices reach all-time highs; now we learn that the president’s top economic adviser has recommended a 50-cent increase in gas taxes. While John Kerry thinks hard-working Americans are paying more than their fair share at the pump, the administration’s reckless plan, if it were law, would cost taxpayers in upwards of $1,000 a year in additional taxes.
Is this accurate? Sure it plays fast and loose with the truth, but it’s at least as accurate as Bush’s “Wacky” ad.