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As you read this, imagine how different our mass transit system would look, and by extension how different our country would look, if we had used the period of cheap energy in the 1980s and 1990s to gradually raise the gas tax to levels that impact individual behavior. Rather than having the nation shift all at once onto a mass transit system that is woefully underdeveloped, we could have gradually weaned ourselves from our dependence on cars. You know, like the rest of the advanced industrialized world...

DENVER -- With the price of gas approaching $4 a gallon, more commuters are abandoning their cars and taking the train or bus instead.

Mass transit systems around the country are seeing standing-room-only crowds on bus lines where seats were once easy to come by. Parking lots at many bus and light rail stations are suddenly overflowing, with commuters in some towns risking a ticket or tow by parking on nearby grassy areas and in vacant lots.

"In almost every transit system I talk to, we're seeing very high rates of growth the last few months," said William W. Millar, president of the American Public Transportation Association.

"It's very clear that a significant portion of the increase in transit use is directly caused by people who are looking for alternatives to paying $3.50 a gallon for gas."

Some cities with long-established public transit systems, like New York and Boston, have seen increases in ridership of 5 percent or more so far this year. But the biggest surges -- of 10 to 15 percent or more over last year -- are occurring in many metropolitan areas in the South and West where the driving culture is strongest and bus and rail lines are more limited.

Here in Denver, for example, ridership was up 8 percent in the first three months of the year compared with last year, despite a fare increase in January and a slowing economy, which usually means fewer commuters. Several routes on the system have reached capacity, particularly at rush hour, for the first time.

"We are at a tipping point," said Clarence W. Marsella, chief executive of the Denver Regional Transportation District, referring to gasoline prices.

Transit systems in metropolitan areas like Minneapolis, Seattle, Dallas-Fort Worth and San Francisco reported similar jumps. In cities like Houston, Nashville, Salt Lake City, and Charlotte, N.C., commuters in growing numbers are taking advantage of new bus and train lines built or expanded in the last few years. The American Public Transportation Association reports that localities with fewer than 100,000 people have also experienced large increases in bus ridership.

In New York, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority reports that ridership was up the first three months of the year by more than 5 percent on the Long Island Rail Road and the Metro-North Railroad, while M.T.A. bus ridership was up 10.9 percent. New York City subway use was up 6.8 percent for January and February. Ridership on New Jersey Transit trains was up more than 5 percent for the first three months of the year.

The increase in transit use coincides with other signs that American motorists are beginning to change their driving habits, including buying smaller vehicles. The Energy Department recently predicted that Americans would consume slightly less gasoline this year than last -- for the first yearly decline since 1991.

Oil prices broke yet another record on Friday, climbing $2.27, to $125.96 a barrel. The national average for regular unleaded gasoline reached $3.67 a gallon, up from $3.04 a year ago, according to AAA.

But meeting the greater demand for mass transit is proving difficult. The cost of fuel and power for public transportation is about three times that of four years ago, and the slowing economy means local sales tax receipts are down, so there is less money available for transit services. Higher steel prices are making planned expansions more expensive.

Typically, mass transit systems rely on fares to cover about a third of their costs, so they depend on sales taxes and other government funding. Few states use gas tax revenue for mass transit.

In Denver, transportation officials expected to pay $2.62 a gallon for diesel this year, but they are now paying $3.20. Every penny increase costs the Denver Regional Transportation District an extra $100,000 a year. And it is bracing for a $19 million shortfall in sales taxes this year from original projections.

"I'd like to put more buses on the street," Mr. Marsella said. "I can't expand service as much as I'd like to."

Average annual growth from sales tax revenue for the Bay Area Rapid Transit District, a rail service that connects San Francisco with Oakland, has been 4.5 percent over the last 15 years. It expects that to fall to 2 percent this year, and electricity costs are rising.

UPDATE: The Internet's Matthew Yglesias comments:

What happens next? What really shouldn't happen is for politicians to run around talking as if expensive gasoline is a temporary phenomenon. Responsible leaders will tell people that prices will fluctuate, but that as long as the Chinese and Indian economies keep growing, the general trajectory will be upward. Then they should sympathize with people who would like to take transit, but find it prohibitively inconvenient and with people who've just started taking transit and are finding it annoying and they should commit to making transit better and more available.

Alternatively, you could act like southern Florida and propose steep service reductions on your commuter rail system. But that'd be crazy. Jurisdictions with existing commuter rail lines need to make service more frequent. With transit, you can get into good equilibria and bad equilibria. On the good path, you have tons and tons of people who want to ride your line and as a result service is very frequent so as to accommodate all the traffic. And because service is so frequent, lots of people find the line convenient to use. On the bad path, infrequent service leads to low ridership which leads to infrequent service which leads to low ridership.

The idea of multiple equilibrium points is key here. Far too often, critics of mass transit point to low ridership numbers and conclude that people simply aren't interested in taking mass transit. But of course that's not necessarily what those numbers mean at all. Without any more information, the most you can say is that they do not want to take mass transit as it is currently configured. Make it more frequent, more convenient, more pleasant to use, and more cost effective, and its entirely possible that you would see a huge surge in use. Over the past few months, we've seen only one of those 4 things shift, and already people are beginning to change their behavior.

Via Atrios, MSN's Charley Blaine looks at the price of oil and muses:

The news got lots of attention: Goldman Sachs analyst Arjun Murti predicted Tuesday that the price of crude oil could hit $150 to $200 a barrel in six to 24 months. (Here's one discussion of the report. Another is here.)

Crude oil in New York promptly jumped to as high as $122.73 a barrel in New York before closing at $121.84. And, as I write this, crude was trading slightly lower in electronic trading. But it also had the perverse effect of pushing the stock market higher. Indeed, the biggest winners in Tuesday's stock market were oil and gas production companies, natural gas companies. (But not refiners; crude oil is rising faster than refiners can push their prices up.)

So, if crude jumps to $150 or $200, how does that translate into prices at the gas pump. Here's the scary part.

If crude hits $150 a barrel, we could be looking at $5 a gallon or so for the retail price of gasoline. That's based on Tuesday's $3.61-a-gallon national average and the rule of thumb that, for every $1 increase in crude oil, the pump price rises 5 cents a gallon.

If crude hits $200, the retail price of gas jumps to $7.52 a gallon. (Plus or minus a few cents) To fill the 10-gallon gas tank on my Honda Civic would cost $75.20, probably more because I live in Washington state, which has relatively high gasoline taxes.

Will there be any U.S.-based auto manufacturers left? The answer depends entirely on how fast they can transform their product lines. Chrysler is in deep trouble already. That probably means more stress for the Midwest.

Will there be any domestic airlines left? The so-called legacy airlines (American, United, Northwest, Delta and Continental) would either try to combine into one big carrier or simply disappear. They're having serious troubles surviving as it is. This means big troubles for cities where these airlines operate hubs that generate thousands of jobs like Atlanta, Cleveland, Newark, Houston, Chicago, Denver, Dallas, Memphis and Minneapolis-St. Paul.

How will big convention cities survive? Places like Las Vegas, New Orleans, Atlanta, Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Houston have thriving convention industries, all built around the capacity of airlines to transport conventioneers to and from the destinations relatively cheaply. Emphasis on the word "cheaply."

How will tourist destinations like Florida or Hawaii cope? Add to that places like, say, Williamstown, Mass., whose Williamstown Theater Festival is a big draw, or Ashland, Ore., home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. They're not close to major cities.

There is an almost perfect storm of bad economic news brewing, and the mortgage mess is really only a small indication of what is to come. The era of cheap oil is ending, assuming of course that it is not already over. The 1970s gave us an early warning, a chance to act and minimize the eventual pain, but it was a warning we chose to almost wholly ignore. Rather than plan for an inevitable yet still distant future, we chose instead to do nothing, doubling down knowing fully that it was future generations who would cover our losses should the magical markets not produce ponies for everyone to ride.

It's our mess, and we've no choice now but to clean it up. I do hope the Baby Boomers enjoyed their party. Because this hangover is really gonna hurt.

Greg Mankiw passes along this gem from the Washington Times:

John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee who should know better, was the first presidential candidate to endorse the gas-tax holiday for the summer driving season. Reportedly, the idea originated with a political pollster, not among Mr. McCain's economic advisers.

Such a straight talker that John McCain! He tells you like his pollsters tell him it is! Never mind the facts - if you want to hear it, he'll tell you! So bold! So different!

UPDATE: And while we are on the subject of gas tax economics, today's effort from Paul Krugman is really quite sad. I'll let Peter Dorman explain:

(Krugman) argues that, unlike the differences between Obama's and Clinton's health care plans, their split on gas taxes is minor stuff. Economists are miffed at HC because tax incidence is their lamppost, says Paul, but what to do about high oil prices is second order.

He's got to be kidding.

The best that can be said for the gas tax holiday is that, in its Clintonoid version, it is nearly pointless. A few cents per gallon get shifted from federal taxes to oil companies, since price at the pump is largely governed by demand, and then they get shifted back to the government with Hillary's windfall oil profits tax. It is a big, meaningless shuffle that sells itself as populism. Since the dollars more or less end up in the same pockets they start out in, you might say Krugman is right.

But this is not why the vast majority of economists are perturbed. Yes, there is a matter of professional pride at stake, but it is more justified than Krugman is willing to admit. Clinton's proposal, featured in her latest round of TV ads, is transparently dishonest: it promises something she and every reasonably well-informed observer knows to be false. The appropriate analogy is not to disagreements on trade, which Krugman brings up, but to supply-side snake oil, the claim (which McCain seems to be embracing) that cutting taxes raises revenues. The issue is not good versus bad policy, but honesty versus dishonesty. Economists are trained to see the cynicism behind such ploys, and they do a service to call attention to it.

But there is an even bigger issue lurking just beneath the surface. Without a doubt, one of the biggest challenges all of us, in the US and around the world, will face during the coming years is the increasing scarcity and rising price of oil. We will experience this as a threat to our living standards, a barrier to global rebalancing (getting the US trade deficit under control), and perhaps even a trigger for catastrophic military confrontation. (For a blast of sanity on this last point, see Michael Klare.) At the same time, the imperative of reducing carbon emissions will require us to wean ourselves from oil even faster than market forces alone would dictate.

Of course, no rational politician will tell us how he or she plans to get us out of the era of cheap oil. Any discussion of politics has to take place against a backdrop of cowardice and insincerity. That means we have to read the tea leaves, like the current dustup over whether to suspend gas taxes. So what does this "unimportant" proposal say about Clinton's plans for a future oil policy? Taken at face value--and how else should we take it?--it suggests that she will delay measures to reign in demand or even try to subsidize fuel consumption for short term political advantage. Unless this election-year idea is just a charade, it portends a phony populism that places our well-being, and possibly our survival, at even greater risk.

And that's the point: either she's serious, in which case she is well beyond clueless in one of the most crucial policy areas imaginable, or she is blatantly pandering, manipulating the ignorance of voters to her own personal benefit. Either are inexcusable. And yet Krugman excuses them nonetheless.

C'mon Paul - Hillary has said she has no respect for economists. You are one of the brightest economists of your generation. How can you possibly continue to support someone who has so brazenly dismissed your life's work?

UPDATE: Mark Thoma:

To me, the claims being made about this proposal are the same as saying tax cuts pay for themselves. Even if it has popular appeal, even if it wins votes and elections, economists are in wide agreement in saying that the proposal is misleading as stated by the campaign, and generally a bad idea. When literally all the experts around you are telling you that what you are saying is misleading (at best), yet you declare you are going to say it anyway, that's no better than the Laffer curve stuff. Sure, it's not much money, but what if this were attacking Iran instead and she declared she was just going to do it anyway? That's a bigger deal, and refusing to listen to experts - dismissing them as out of touch and elitist - tells us something important...

The point here is that this is a lousy way to help people. It's not that we don't care, or don't understand, it's that we do care and understand all to well and we'd like to see policies put into place that actually have a chance to help people. Promising things that aren't likely to happen - telling people they will get relief when it will likely be a pittance (the $70 figure they cite is not supported by the underlying economics) - simply leads to disappointment and disenchantment with politicians. All we are asking is that promises have a chance to be realized. Let's help the people who need help, but let's do it in a way that is effective rather than in a way that plays off their difficulties and fears, but does not really address their needs.

One of the hallmarks of progressivism, at least in its 20th century version, was the belief that expert opinion could be enlisted to better the lives of average citizens. Current progressives have a much more realistic understanding of things than their forbearers once did, but nevertheless the belief that education, training and expertise matter is still there. Unless you are Hillary Clinton and you need to win an election, I guess.

Remind me why we should consider her to be a progressive again?

UPDATE II: Looks like all the big guns are in on this one. Greg Mankiw:

Paul Krugman thinks all of the fuss about the gas tax holiday has become a bit hysterical. He agrees that the policy is a bad idea, but it is no big deal, so let's not focus on it.

Paul is right that the issue is, quantitatively, small potatoes, but I am nonetheless pleased to see it get so much attention. This issue is like the canary in the coal mine: No one really cares about the canary, but its condition tells us about deeper problems that lie below.

Many economic issues (e.g., health care, corporate taxation, the trade deficit) are vastly complicated, with experts holding a variety of opinions. When candidates disagree, it simply means that each is siding with a different set of experts, and it is hard for laymen to figure out which set of experts is right. By contrast, the gas tax holiday is not nearly as complicated, and the experts speak with one voice.

Why, then, are candidates proposing the holiday? I can think of three hypotheses:

Ignorance: They don't know that the consensus of experts is opposed.

Hubris: They know the experts are opposed, but they think they know better.

Mendacity with a dash of condescension: They know the experts are opposed, and they secretly agree, but they think they can win some votes by pulling the wool over the eyes of an ill-informed electorate.

So which of these three hypotheses is right? I don't know, but whichever it is, it says a lot about the character of the candidates.

Is there any doubt that with Clinton it is choice #3?

Ah. Now Clinton's sudden aversion to the opinions of experts makes perfect sense:

"We need a president who's a fighter again," Mrs. Clinton said at a rally on Thursday, adding that the next president must understand what it is like to "get knocked down and get back up: that's the story of America, right?"

In recent days, Mrs. Clinton has chided the experts for "counting me out" and Senator Barack Obama for his inability to "close the deal" and declared that no one was going to make her quit. "She makes Rocky Balboa look like a pansy," North Carolina's governor, Michael F. Easley, said in endorsing her, and a union leader in Portage, Ind., praised her "testicular fortitude."

I really was planning to let this go, but Hillary said some things this weekend that were so silly that, well... just take a look at this:

Sunday:

"I think we've been for the last seven years seeing a tremendous amount of government power and elite opinion behind policies that haven't worked well for hard working Americans... It's really odd to me that arguing to give relief to a vast majority of Americans creates this incredible pushback...Elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that don't benefit" the vast majority of the American people."

Again, Sunday:

"Well, I'll tell you what, I'm not going to put my lot in with economists."

And just for good measure, here is Howard Wolfson, Clinton's Communications Directior, offering this gem:

"The presidency requires leadership.... There are times when the president does something that the group of experts, quote unquote, does not agree with. Presidents get advice and then act, and that is what Senator Clinton is doing."

Rather than rant about how this is the very same attitude towards empirical reality that produced the Iraq debacle, blocked any progress on environmental protection or climate change legislation, or any of a million other policy disasters over the past seven years, I'm going to outsource a much smarter response to Jonathan Cohn:

Back when the issue of the day was mandates to purchase health insurance, her campaign wasn't nearly so dismissive about what the experts thought. On the contrary, they repeatedly cited the verdict of economists and other health care experts as proof that their position was correct.

I thought Clinton was right then, just as surely as I think she is wrong now. And while I'd argue the insurance issue is more important, if only because the gas tax holiday would be temporary, the argument itself is probably more egregious now because--as far as I can tell--the experts' skepticism about a gas tax holiday is unanimous.

I'd actually push that just a bit further. In abstract, Clinton's health care plan really is better than Obama's, and if pushed I suspect Obama would admit that too. He has said, after all, that if we could start over from scratch he'd build a single payer system, so what's at issue here isn't which is the best policy solution in abstract, but which is the best politically feasible policy solution. Everyone admits that reform with tough mandates will be a bit harder to pass, but Sen. Clinton has made the decision that it is nevertheless worth the fight. Why? Because health care experts largely agree that mandates are necessary if you want to simultaneously lower costs and reach universality!

Were she to follow her gas-tax approach to policymaking in health care, there's just no way she would support her own plan. Mandates, however effective they might be, aren't popular. Nevertheless, she is ignoring the opinion of average voters and proposing something that has the backing of most policy experts. By her own telling, that makes her an elitist who doesn't understand the problems of the average working family.

Its really simple. Listen to the people to find out what their problems are. Listen to policy experts to determine how to solve those problems. Hillary Clinton knows this, of course, because one of her strengths has always been that she is a policy wonk. As she so often reminds us, she works hard to come up with solutions to our problems. She is an expert who has the experience necessary to do the job right on day one. Except....

Will someone please make this ridiculous primary campaign end? Please?

UPDATE: Hilzoy:

Clinton is presently making a big deal about the fact that she is "a fighter". After this primary season, I don't think there can be any doubt about her willingness to fight. What Clinton's gas tax proposal tells me is what she's willing to fight for. She is not willing to fight for what she thinks is right in the face of public pressure. She's not even willing to restrict her compromises to cases in which public pressure to do something stupid already exists. She will sacrifice principle and the public good when it's expedient for her to do so.

Which is to say: she's a fighter, all right, but what she fights for is her own interest, not what she thinks is right.

Based on this episode, how much confidence can we have that she'll really be wiling to go to the mat to combat global warming? None at all. Based on her vote for the Iraq War Resolution -- a vote that was, at the time, seen (wrongly) as one that Democrats had to cast if they wanted to secure their own political viability -- how much confidence can we have that she'll be willing to go to the mat to protect our national interests or to prevent a pointless, stupid, destructive war? Likewise, none at all.

If there's anything we should have learned from George W. Bush, it's that generalized combativeness is not a good thing in a President. We need not just someone who's willing to fight in general, but someone who's willing to fight for the right things. If you think that the right things just are the things that advance Hillary Clinton's political interests, then there's no problem. But if you want someone who is willing to fight for good policies that are in our national interest, that actually address serious problems, then it's worth recognizing that while she is more than willing to fight, she is not willing to fight for that...

Let's pretend, for the moment, that we don't know that a gas tax holiday would simply shift revenues from the government to the oil companies, revenue that Clinton's windfall profit tax would then take back again. I'd like to know in what possible world resisting a gas tax holiday could possibly count as "standing with the oil companies". Even if a gas tax holiday meant that the price of gas would actually go down, that would presumably help the oil companies by boosting demand for oil. It wouldn't help them as much as it would in the actual world, in which the oil companies stand to pocket most of the money the government be giving up, but it would still be a net positive for them.

Does anyone think that cutting cigarette taxes would count as "taking on big tobacco"? Of course not. So why would cutting gasoline taxes count as "taking on big oil"? If anyone is "standing with big oil" at the moment, it's Clinton and McCain.

The relationship between campaign rhetoric and reality is normally pretty loose. But in this case, Clinton and McCain's rhetoric seems to have divorced itself from reality entirely. It's as though old campaign cliches -- taking on big oil, standing up to special interests -- are now just free-floating phrases that can attach themselves to anything and everything. I expect this from George "Clear Skies Initiative" Bush, and from John "I have no clue what I'm talking about" McCain. Call me naive, but while I did expect Clinton to spin things to her advantage, I didn't expect her rhetoric to have no relation to reality whatsoever. Apparently, I was wrong.

UPDATE II: Tim F + Tom Levenson:

Here I was about to write a semi-long post about the Clinton campaign's fourth-quarter full court press with no goalie, and then I see Tom Levenson wrote it first.

[B]roadly speaking, judging by the issues papers on her website, Clinton has maintained a fairly sophisticated approach to global warming and applied research, with the implication that the policies near and dear to scientists' hearts -- more money, and even more important, respect for the real knowledge developed within by scientific process, would flow under a Clinton presidency. What Clinton provided for public consumption may be boilerplate, but it has been good boilerplate.

But now, what she said at the Indiana interview this morning changes the game. She said, in effect, if the smart boys and girls don't agree with her, then to hell with them.

That is, of course, precisely the anti-rational madness that has dominated the George Bush years. It is inimical to science or a scientific world view. If we are to pick and choose the facts we like, it is a very short step, quickly taken, to making them up. And that way lies an ever more rapid collapse of the American republic.

Do I have anything to add? Not really. Hillary seemed to be doing fine until the inevitability meme died, and then her campaign went a little crazy. It's reached the point now where she doesn't just sound like a Republican, she sounds like the intellectual dregs that the GOP tries to keep off of network TV. She sounds like David Horowitz. Are we really that far from Gastaxofascism Awareness Week? Her rhetoric offers up the same paranoid conviction that all of the experts on Earth are either wrong or out to get you.

Maybe Hillary knows that her populist message really is pap and nonsense, but then maybe Horowitz does too. They're both either stupid enough to believe what they're saying or enough morally stunted to lead masses down an intellectually poisonous path in return for some cheap attention.

UPDATE III: One last late addition. John Cole:

Since oil is apparently the only thing we talk about anymore, I have a great idea for the 2008 Presidential election. We should elect two people with extensive ties to oil. Real oil industry insiders, who have experience and know how these things work. I bet we could get oil prices down in no time if we do that.

Oh. Wait. Nevermind.

Roubini:

The official headline for U.S. Q1 GDP growth says a positive 0.6% growth but the details are ugly and confirm that we are in a recession.

First of all, if you exclude the increase of inventory of unsold goods (that moved positive after a negative figure in Q4) the Final Sales of Domestic Product were a negative 0.2%. In other terms, inventories of unsold goods added an artificial 0.8% to Q1 growth boosting it from a negative 0.2% to a positive 0.6%. So actual aggregate demand (Final Sales of Domestic Product) - the actual measure of growth of true demand - fell in Q1. And this build-up of inventories in Q1 means that the fall in GDP in Q2 will be larger than otherwise as firms will have to reduce that large inventory of unsold goods via a further reduction in production and employment.

Second, residential investment is in total free fall, collapsing at an accelerating annual rate of 26.7%. But GDP figures underestimate the true fall in aggregate demand as they do not separate residential investment into true final sales of new homes and into the unsold inventory of new homes that are produced and not sold. Thus, all production of new homes is assumed to be sold in the national income accounts data. But we know that home sales are falling more than production of new homes, that cancellation rates (running at a rate of 20-30%) are not included in the new home sales figures and that the inventory of unsold new homes is actually rising. Thus, if the BEA had correctly measured final sales of domestic product, by having a separate line for the change in the inventories of new unsold homes (the equivalent of the change in business inventories), the figure for final sales of domestic product would have been even more negative than the already negative 0.2%, probably a negative 1.0%. So the national accounts make a methodological mistake in measuring final sales of domestic product by assuming that the change in inventories of unsold housing is always zero, something that is obviously wrong especially during a severe housing recession.

UPDATE: Meanwhile.... For Exxon Mobil, $10.9 Billion Profit Disappoints. It must be so hard to be Exxon Mobil....

Never mind what your econ101 class told you. When it comes to oil, there is a lot more going on than price, supply, and demand. Although it is true everywhere, it is particularly true in America: in the short term, demand is very, very sticky, and thus often works largely independent of price. Think about your own life for a moment and this will make sense. The location of your home, the location of your job, and the type of car you drive are the three things that largely determine your level of consumption, and none of them are easy to change. Thus, as the price of gas goes up, its very difficult for you to change your behavior such that you consumer less.

And if you think that's bad, scale up and think about it at a societal level. The roads we build and the suburban communities we develop might be changeable over multiple decades, but over the short term they are essentially fixed.

And that's why the growing evidence that we've reached the peak of oil production is really, really scary. On Monday, for example, OPEC ministers warned that oil may head to $200 a barrel, and there's not much they or anyone else can do about it.

And that stupid gas tax holiday that bothMcCain and Clinton have embraced? It will do much more harm than good.

UPDATE: James Fallows lets it rip:

The pandering and ignorance-across-party-lines represented by the John McCain-Hillary Clinton united front for a temporary reduction in the gasoline tax should make Americans hold their heads in their hands and moan. No one who has thought about this issue thinks that it will actually reduce prices or -- more important -- help the the people disproportionately hurt by $100+/barrel oil and $4 gasoline. And to the extent it has any effect on America's long-term approach to energy policy, transportation, oil dependence, and climate change, the effect will be perverse.

I can imagine that John McCain, who boasts about his sketchy command of economics, might consider this a good idea. But the master of policy, Hillary Clinton??

Please. This is embarrassing. It makes me long for the good old days of debating about flag pins on the lapel. And I wonder: has there been bipartisan agreement to stupider effect in, say, the last fifty years? The US Senate's 88-2 vote in favor of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964 doesn't count: they didn't know what lay ahead. Hillary Clinton, at least, knows why what she is saying is wrong. I will pay for a year's subscription to the Atlantic for anyone who can come up with a more foolishly destructive bipartisan example.

Update: The 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force vote that paved the way for war in Iraq doesn't count either. That vote reflected terrible judgment, in my view, but not outright stupidity or, as with the current gas-tax charade, certain foreknowledge that the policy being recommended would do no good.

UPDATE II: And Ezra:

Policy is hard. Lots of people come to different conclusions. Unanimity is rare. Except on this gas tax holiday. Just about no one thinks it a good idea. Conservative economists loathe it, liberal economists loathe it, energy experts loathe it...it's shameless pandering of the worst sort. So is the media going to create a scandal around McCain's pander? Around Clinton's copy-pander? Will they hound them at press conferences, run segments about the derailed "Straight Talk Express," bring on pollsters to ask whether Americans are tired of being lied to?

Well, not quite. There's some evidence that the media is, at least, representing them aggregate opinion of the experts. And Tom Friedman is certainly on the side of the angels here. But that's as far as the media's been willing to take it. As of yet, there's no real effort to report on a bald-faced, shameless policy pander in the way they reported on Tuzla or "I voted for it before I voted against it."

When confronted by the fact that their coverage of politics is frequently trivial and annoying, many in the media argue that they only report that way because the voters make their decisions based on trivial and annoying issues. But there's no doubt that, with proper press coverage, the gas holiday could be one of those trivial and annoying issues that comes to stand-in for broader character failures or narratives or whatever. It's just that the media doesn't like to deal with policy.

UPDATE III: Matt Yglesias counters with this:

UPDATE IV: Tom Friedman:

It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer's travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.

John Cole then piles on:

Being called ridiculous by the guy whose last big idea was that the world is flat has got to leave a mark. This gas tax holiday nonsense is so stupid that even the Cato Institute trotted out Jerry Taylor to CNN to report that it was a dumb idea.

I really can not figure out what is more offensive about this pandering from Clinton and McCain- that they think they can fool you into believing the gas tax holiday will actually lower gas prices (it won't), or that they think your vote can be bought for the princely sum of 2-3 bucks per week. We'll call it a tie.

UPDATE V: Publius:

What's troubling about the Great Gas Tax Pander is not so much the pander itself, but the larger more general concerns it raises about Clinton (who, of course, remains infinitely superior to McCain).

First, it shows that Clinton is more likely to use arguments that explicitly rely on voter ignorance. She knows that this policy stinks, but she is assuming that low-information voters won't know the difference. Those silly latte drinkers with their fancy-pants inelasticies don't understand the working man. But snark aside, the lack of respect for her audience shows far more elitism than Obama's earlier comments ever did. (See also Michigan primary).

Second, and more troublingly, the pander provides further evidence of Clinton's instincts to run from progressive positions in the face of political pressure from the right. Like Bill before her, she is very quick to adopt conservative, nationalist positions at the expense of sound policy in these circumstances (e.g., gas tax, "obliterate Iran," Iraq, Kyl-Lieberman, etc.).

I can think of two explanations for this behavior. One, she's not very liberal. Two, her guiding political philosophy is to avoid looking too liberal. Either way, not good.

I think we are officially approaching blogswarm levels on this one.