Opinion: Barack Obama could rue his no-debate decision
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Might Barack Obama come to regret his decision to pass on a debate with Hillary Clinton prior to Tuesday’s primaries in North Carolina and Indiana?
Yes, there have already been 21 such encounters. But we raise the question because, even as the tumult surrounding the Rev. Jeremiah Wright sucked up much of the campaign oxygen this week, a real, honest-to-goodness policy difference surfaced between the two Democratic presidential contenders (as we’ve noted before, there have been precious few such splits). And if expert opinion counts for anything, Obama could use a direct face-off with Clinton to make a powerful case against her call for a summer suspension of the federal gasoline tax.
Obama, when not consumed with putting as much space as possible between himself and Wright, has scoffed at the proposal -- also embraced by Republican John McCain -- as a gimmick that would save the average driver about half a tank of gas over the three-month period.
‘This isn’t an idea designed to get you through the summer, it’s designed to get them through an election,’ Obama said in North Carolina earlier this week.
Meanwhile, the suggestion -- which hasn’t a ghost of a chance of being enacted ...
... by Congress -- is getting roundly panned by virtually everyone taking a serious look at it.
Check out these editorials in the L.A. Times, the N.Y. Times and, for the view from the heartland, the Cincinnati Enquirer.
A front-page story in today’s Washington Post cast a wide net and reported that ‘a growing chorus’ viewed the gas-tax suspension plan as ‘ineffective and shortsighted.’
The entire piece can be read here, but here are some comments that leapt out at us.
Said professor N. Gregory Mankiw of Harvard University: ‘What you learn in Economics 101 is that if producers can’t produce much more, when you cut the tax on that good the tax is kept ... by the suppliers and is not passed on to consumers.’
And Leonard Burman, a tax policy heavyweight at the Brookings Institution think tank, is withering in his critique of Clinton’s additional push for a windfall-profits tax on oil companies to guard against them simply pocketing the relief provided by a gas-tax break. He termed the dual proposal ‘utterly incoherent,’ telling the Post it would only intensify supply problems by discouraging oil exploration.
Summed up Burman: ‘So a policy intended to lower prices, but which won’t do that, will be offset with a policy that’s likely to raise prices over the long term.’
Sounds like a pretty effective sound-bite Obama could offer on a debate stage.
-- Don Frederick