Manchin Says He’s ‘Not a Yes Right Now’ on Biden’s Gas Tax Holiday, Argues Electric Cars ‘Pay Nothing’ to Maintain Highways
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Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) may end up being a thorn in the side of yet another initiative from the White House, telling reporters on Wednesday that he was “not a yes right now” on the gas tax holiday proposal promoted by President Joe Biden.
In a statement issued by the White House Wednesday morning, Biden called for a three-month suspension of federal gas taxes, which are currently 18 cents per gallon of gasoline and 24 cents per gallon of diesel. The president also encouraged local and state governments to pass their own gas tax holidays, as well as urging oil and gas companies to reduce prices.
“I’m not a yes right now, that’s for sure,” Manchin said to ABC News congressional correspondent Rachel Scott.
Manchin expressed concerns that the gas tax suspension would “put another hole into the budget,” noting that federal gas taxes go into the Highway Trust Fund to pay for highways, roads, and bridges across the U.S., but Congress already had to shore up the fund, sending an additional $118 billion through the bipartisan infrastructure package that passed earlier this year.
“We put over $5 trillion out into the marketplace” with the Covid relief checks, he commented, “and it’s all forgotten and all we have now is higher inflation and really more hardship on people that need some good decisions here in the Congress. We just need to start looking at the long-term effect of what we are doing and how we are doing it.”
He also told Scott he was skeptical how much cutting 18 cents per gallon would really help American consumers, since he doubted that full 18-cents would make it to people as a price cut.
The complicated political ramifications invoked by a gas tax holiday scheduled to expire at the end of September, right before the midterm elections, also worried Manchin. “Which politician up here is going to be voting to put that 18-cent tax back on a month before the November election? So, we just dig the whole deeper and deeper and deeper,” he said.
The senator brought up electric vehicles, commenting that the reliance on gas taxes to fund transportation infrastructure was essentially giving electric vehicles a free ride.
“Electric vehicles have to pay proportionally also as they use the same roadways and vehicles,” said Manchin, but currently they are not. “They’re paying nothing. So, we need a lot of adjustments made.”
Watch the video above, via ABC News.
