If the back and forth between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama over her proposal for a gas-tax holiday has a vaguely familiar ring to it, there’s a reason. In 1992, her husband made Paul Tsongas’ proposed gas tax increase a major issue in their Democratic primary fight:
“It is frustrating for me to be told the only morally appropriate way to wean America off cheap foreign oil is a nickel-a-gallon gasoline tax,” Mr. Clinton said. “Your incomes went down and your taxes went up in the 80’s and Senator Tsongas wants to feed you more of the same in the 90’s. And it’s wrong.”
Of course, once Bill Clinton was elected, he took a very different view of that tax:
President-elect Bill Clinton, who repeatedly criticized Paul Tsongas and Ross Perot in the Presidential campaign for supporting an increase in Federal gasoline taxes, is hearing from a lot of his advisers that it is not such a bad idea after all, and he seems to be warming to the idea.
“There were a lot of good arguments made for the gas tax,” Mr. Clinton said at a news conference after the two-day meeting on the economy that he convened in Little Rock, Ark., in early December.
And, ultimately, a gasoline tax hike became a major element in Bill Clinton’s signature economic achievement:
The vote on the gas tax increase in 1993 was so partisan that no Republicans voted for it; Vice President Al Gore cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate. The legislation was intended to reduce the deficit by $500 billion, and the gas tax was a particularly contentious part of that legislation.