How much would a waiver of the 18.4 cents per gallon federal tax help to correct inflation? Not a bit, argues the editorial board at Bloomberg/Quint, calling the gas-tax holiday suggestion from desperate Democrats a “terrible idea.” Not only would it do nothing for inflation, it would sap the highway fund of resources it desperately needs — and which inflation is already rapidly draining:

Unfortunately, that includes a proposal by a group of Democratic senators to waive the 18.4-cents-a-gallon federal tax on gasoline through the end of the year — an idea that would do nothing to fight inflation but would do lasting harm to the federal budget.

Revenue from the gas tax goes into the Highway Trust Fund, which is the primary way the U.S. pays for surface transportation. A critical weakness of this system is that the tax was never indexed to inflation; it’s been stuck at the same level since President Bill Clinton’s first year in office. The result is that even as Americans have driven more and more miles by the year, the trust fund has been persistently eroded in real terms, leading to a series of emergency measures to stabilize it. It faces a shortfall of some $160 billion over the next decade.

A gas-tax holiday will only compound this problem. The cost of repairing and maintaining highways will rise along with inflation while the trust fund is depleted all the faster. By one estimate, suspending the tax through the end of the year (as the bill envisions) would cost about $20 billion, hasten the fund’s insolvency by a full year, and potentially even increase inflation by stimulating demand for other goods and services. Because it would also add to the demand for gas, it would likely push up pre-tax prices, thereby eliminating much of the consumer benefit and potentially contributing to higher energy costs more generally. Drivers might save a grand total of $2 a week.

Woo-hoo! Party time, right? Not so fast. First, $2 per week comes up to $104 dollars a year. The median household income in the US in 2020, according to the Census Bureau, was $67,521. That comes up to roughly $1300 a week, gross. Assuming an overall tax bite of 40% in the paycheck, that leaves $40,512 in annual disposable income or net income. If inflation runs at 7.5% annually, that means that the buying power of that $40,512 gets eroded to $37,474, a loss of about $60 a week in disposable income from the start of that year to its end, assuming inflation remains constant.

An extra bottle of Two-Buck Chuck won’t make a dent in the damage done by inflation, in other words. It’s probably going to be Four-Buck Chuck by the end of the year anyway. And all of that assumes that gas prices don’t keep scaling upward at a higher rate than overall CPI, which they almost certainly will do, especially with war on the horizon with Ukraine.

This idea is just as short-sighted as Joe Biden’s stimulus bill, which he and his fellow Democrats apparently intend to flog ceaselessly at the State of the Union address and afterward. That bill touched off the inflationary wave with its unnecessary sugar-high consumption boost in the spring of 2021, compounding an existing supply chain crisis and a labor shortage. It did nothing to help families in the long run, and the massive inflation it catalyzed has left families far worse off than before, especially working-class families.

Now the Democrats want to employ another short-term patch to a gargantuan problem of their own making. It’s a bad idea on its own, but it’s even worse as an answer to inflation. It’s every bit as gimmicky and useless as a release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a tactic that Biden’s already tried and which has already failed. This is just a demonstration that Democrats have incompetently put us into an inflationary wave that they have no rational plan to curtail, let alone end. They’re reaching into the bag of old, failed central-planning tricks because they can’t come up with anything else. Voters have finally figured out that these emperors have no clothes at all, not even the old ones.