(Just kidding, of course, except about the dkos links being considered uncredible ...)

and the amount isn't even indexed to inflation.

It's been 18.4 cents/gallon since 1993.

Probably when prices go up significantly the government gets slightly less because consumption is slightly reduced.

but they can quote or paraphrase economists as well as candidates. Here is Reuters today, one of the top stories on Yahoo: "Clinton-McCain gas tax holiday slammed as bad idea"

Economists said that since refineries cannot increase their supply of gasoline in the space of a few summer months, lower prices will just boost demand and the benefits will flow to oil companies, not consumers. [...] Economists also saw it is a poor way of getting money to the households that need it most and warned that it might end up in the cash tills of the oil companies.

People can smell pandering. This won't help McCain, who already has a reputation for being clueless when it comes to the economy.

If the Dems as a united front criticized his proposal and said it illustrates how bankrupt of ideas and common sense his campaign really is, he'd be on the defensive every time the issue came up.

Well, what you call my overstatement was immediately put into perspective by the next line: "But I suspect both McCain and Clinton know that this is not a good idea. It’s an idea that sounds good to the average American, though, so it scores them political points." So I think we pretty much agree on their rationale here.

Whether this is a tactical blunder on Obama's part remains to be seen. It pretty much falls in line with one of his over-arching messages: stop with the bulls**t. A quote from Dean Baker , co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC.:

If Senator Clinton is able to use this proposal to draw a contrast with
Senator Obama in expressing concern for middle-class families it could
only be attributable to the extraordinary incompetence of the reporters
who are covering the campaign.

Now, I am under no illusions that said reporters are not extraordinarily incompetent, but Obama generally does a decent job explaining his positions, so I have some hope that this could work out in his favor. It certainly has improved my respect for him. We'll just have to wait and see how it all plays out.

1) Possibly a contradiction, I suppose. You could say it either works as advertised, and is bad for the environment, or it does not, and is a harmless feel-good gesture. The general impression I get is that it would be a little bit of the worst of both worlds, however – a little decrease that might save people a few bucks initially, but which will soon enough mostly just be extra profit for the producers. So people will be left with a psychological feeling ("hey, it's cheaper than it is supposed to be because there is no tax") and purchase and use accordingly, but won't really be saving any money.

2) Specifically raising the gas tax? Not particularly, although I would not object. I am very much in favor of a carbon tax, or at the very least a cap-and-trade CO2 emissions system. I honestly haven't thought much about specific numbers for such a tax. Obviously either of these strategies would result in increased prices of gasoline, home heating oil, and many other products (putting them more in line with their actual costs, IMHO).

Taxation for the purpose of covering what economists call "externalities" (societal costs not captured in the market price) is legitimate and often desirable. In the case of gas, externalities include climate change, affect on the pace of development of alternative energies, even part of our Defense budget (we could spend less on Defense if we weren't so dependent on oil, which means Persion Gulf oil), so a gas tax to compensate for those externalities seems appropriate and desirable to me.

As an analogy, if smoking led to higher costs for taxpayers (e.g., due to cancer treatment), it would be appropriate to tax cigarettes to cover that additional cost. It so happens that heavy smokers actually SAVE taxpayers money by dying earlier, but my illustration is hypothetical.

As with much of public policy, some suffer disproportionately, through no fault of their own, so that most people can benefit. We should do our best to help such people, but we have to weigh the interests of the few against the interests of the many (and I DON'T mean to suggest that the interests of the many should always win; matters of degree of harm/benefit and matters of merit vs. compassion are factors)

The arguments seem to be:

It won't do as much harm as worse policies that might be less likely to be adopted if we make the dummies think we're doing something to help them.

If suppliers see us fooling the dummies to prevent those worse policies, they might be more likely to expand supply, which would help mitigate the problem a bit.

Is that how you read it, too?