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You need a road map (do they still make those?) to figure out all the political twists and turns as everybody running for office tries to figure out what to do about the high price of gas.
Stating the problem is the easy part. Motorists are fed up by having to spend all their previous disposable income at the pump and seeing an opportunity to help them, everybody and his uncle running for office is eager to help. Don’t kid yourself this is not some grand form of altruism at work. Rather it’s a self-survival effort to win votes by doing something to ease the pain at the pump.
The fun part is deciding what that “something” is.
Let’s start at the top of the political food chain and work our way down.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer found time to come home off the campaign trail to help other Democrats in other states get elected to opine that she does not have a position, yeah or nay, on creating a gas tax holiday for a couple of months by slamming the brakes on collecting the 52 plus cents for every gallon sold. She did reveal that she is looking for some other way to grant relief but so far, nobody has seen what that might be even if there is an alternative. Stay tuned.
House GOP Speaker Matt Hall has demonstrated how to take just about every position there is on this thing starting with a simple stance. He opposed the holiday correctly suggesting that he and the governor and a bi-partisan legislature worked too hard to create a long-awaited road fix package by raising over $2 billion to do it. Ergo now is not the time to take perhaps $600-700 million out of that kitty to appease you and get your vote. And for awhile he stood his ground until he didn’t as the legislative pressure reached critical mass from other election weary colleagues favoring the freeze.
So his next step was to suggest that if the Michigan senate passed the measure, before he would put it up for a vote, the Democrats in the senate had to include some way to find money in the state budget to replace the lost road money. That was a reasonable offer and for a fleeting moment, it looked like this thing might get legs. More on that later on.
But in mid stream, he landed on a third position. Now he says if the senate sends him the bill with or without the replacement cash, he will still put it up for a vote.
Which brings us to another group of critical players in this debate that favors the status quo. Of course not a single soul in the road building lobby, now better know as the Michigan Infrastructure and Transportation Association, is running for office. But they are hoping to beat back this effort to keep the moola flowing into highway construction work already underway, not to mention the millions of stuff on the drawing board just waiting for the concrete to flow. Oh yeah. One more thing. They’d like to preserve jobs for all those road workers who don’t want to add an unemployment check to their pump pain as well.
As the week unfolded MITA became convinced that this was going to pass the senate, but when they counted noses in the Democratic caucus some of the noses were running…away from the vote and so last week it appeared the freeze was on life support.
There are also in this little game lots of candidates who are not in the legislature but have taken the liberty to tell those who are what to do. Take Democratic candidate for governor Jocelyn Benson. She is for a federal gas tax pause but not doing at the state level because it would “blow” a hole in the state budget.
Her GOP opponent John James is for both perhaps hoping that his stance would blow a gaping hole in her double digit lead as we head around the club house turn.
Over in the hotly contested U.S. Senate race the two, Mr. Rogers and Dr. El Sayed, agree on a tax break at both levels.
While the idea is obviously popular with motorists, there are some fish hooks in the “relief” which could be short lived.
So you save 52 cents at the pump at the outset but what if the price goes up beyond that amount and eats the savings?
You folks with gas engines may not care, but Ann Arbor Democratic state Sen. Jeff Irwin correctly notes that EV drivers would get no relief since they never stop by the pump. Some will argue life is not fair.
The aforementioned road building folks also worry once the precedent is set that every time there is a financial hardship, lawmakers know where to go first i.e. back to the road fund. “We are concerned that we have become a political football” in this debate laments a long time lobbyist for the group.
And let’s not forget President Trump who favors relief at the federal level. But he needs votes to do it and all the “votes” left for the campaign trail with not even a hint they would hang around long enough to fulfill Mr. Trump’s wish.
As everyone knows anything can happen in politics at any moment. And if the two sides make a deal, they have plenty of time to consummate it. And political self-serving being what it is, don’t cross that out.