Gas pains

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor N o, this isn’t about my ill-advised trip to Taco Bell…

My absolute favorite part of the paper is the “Text the Times” section. Even before I started working for the newspaper, I always enjoyed reading “Speak Out,” the call-in predecessor to “Text the Times” from back when you would call the paper to leave a voice message rather than text it in (just like when we used to call people on the phone rather than send a text).

When we first had “Speak Out” and “Text the Times,” they were just transcriptions of what the caller or texter sent in, but not long after I became editor, I decided that a lot of these people weren’t just looking to have their say, they also wanted feedback, or at least answers to their questions, so I started responding through my “Editor’s Note” replies. And people really seemed to enjoy that, so much so that we would at times have a whole half-page section of nothing but “Text the Times” texts and my responses.

Sure, every so often I’d get told, “You know, you don’t have to respond to every text!” And that’s true, but I figured I would at least try to give my honest feedback or some useful information when it seemed like that’s what the texter was looking for. Sure, sometimes I got (and still get) nonsense, and when I do, I like to give nonsense in return. And no, we don’t get as many texts as we used to. We used to get three to five a day. Now I get about seven or eight a week and sometimes not even that many, but I still enjoy reading what’s on our readers’ minds and offering my replies.

Well, Monday morning I was checking the “Text the Times” phone, like I do each morning, and there was a new text. Normally, I’d just add it to the week’s file of texts ahead of putting them in the paper, but I knew this one would take a longer response, so I decided to build a column around it … this column.

Here is the text: “Remember when Trump was president and gas was less than $2 a gallon? Pepperidge Farm remembers.”

Now, last things first… I’m not 100 percent sure but I think this person is a regular to Text the Times. I’ve gotten several “Pepperidge Farms remembers” texts over the years. Anyway, yes, I do remember it. It was during the COVID-19 pandemic and gas prices bottomed out so sure, silver linings, I suppose.

I will say here, though, for the record, that one of the few things Trump did while in office that I thought was great was him taking advantage of the depressed oil prices and filling up the U.S. oil reserves on the cheap. Credit where credit is due, and all.

But does the person who sent this in actually think that the president has say over the price of gas? No, this isn’t good-old-liberal me asking, this is just me, wondering what the answer (in this person’s mind) is to this question. I really really do want to know. How does the price of gas tie into President Joe Biden in any way? Or Trump, when he was in office? There are a ton of factors that tie into how much a gallon of gas costs and none of them are who is sitting in the Oval Office, unless you are willing to connect a TON of dots, and even then, it’s very ancillary.

I’m on my 10th president in my lifetime, and exactly ONE of them even attempted to have any direct control of gas prices, and that was Richard Nixon, who in 1972 attempted to fight inflation with mandated price freezes on certain goods, including gas, and it did not work, like at all. If Biden is to blame for bringing gas prices up and Trump was to blame for them dropping, did you credit Obama for bringing them down from the highest in history after the Bush presidency? If you did, you shouldn’t have, because it simply doesn’t work that way.

So, what could be done to lower gas prices? Well, there is one way, but boy are the politicians not going to like it. Simply suspend the federal and state gas taxes. Yep, just do it, and boom! Gas prices will go down no matter what foreign or domestic oil prices or production numbers do. The federal tax on gas is currently 24.4 cents a gallon. In Arkansas, the state tax on a gallon of gas is 24.8 cents per gallon. Suspend those as long as oil prices are above a certain threshold and you’ve got roughly 50 cents per gallon in savings for every consumer in America.

It’s a long-term solution to a short-term problem that could be designed to be implemented as needed and the lower cost of gas would tie directly to the inflated cost of most other goods and services. But again, it would be Congress, not the president who would have to make this happen.