Rep. Eric Cantor started off by talking about the “shock” American families feel with high prices. The time for action has come, but Barack Obama’s comments yesterday show how out of touch he is with this shock. He says that Obama’s suggestion that the only problem is the rate of increase and not the price demonstrates that an Obama presidency would not improve matters. He is “out of touch”.

Doug Holtz-Eakin says that McCain is not “out of touch”, and touted his gas-tax holiday as an example. Again, they point out that Obama voted for such a holiday in Illinois. They then attacked Obama’s tax policies, which will hit taxpayers across the spectrum. John McCain wants to lower corporate tax rates, introduce incentives for modernization, and keep access to capital easy through lower tax rates on capital gains and dividends. Holtz-Eakin makes the rather common-sense case that tax increases on business get passed on to consumers, creating inflationary pressures and not real growth.

Questions:

• Amanda Carpenter — How about drilling in ANWR, and where else can we drill? — Still opposed to ANWR but is open to more production on federal lands.
• Jeff Mason, Reuters — Gas tax holiday got panned by economists and backfired on Hillary Clinton. Is there feedback that says it’s politically adept? — McCain feels that it’s right, and can be done quickly and simply. It’s not a panacaea.
• James Pethrokoukis — Won’t a cap & trade plan force higher energy prices? — McCain’s plan has generous use of offsets, as well as incentives for modernization. The realistic model shows price increases in the future.
• Carol Costello, CNN — Why not draw up legislation now for the gas-tax holiday? — He did, and the Democrats blocked it. Cantor says it got blocked in the House as well.

John McCain is not going to find many votes here by splitting the difference. We have enormous resources on federal lands — an estimated 1.5 trillion recoverable barrels of oil in shale, for instance — and he needs to take action to start accessing those reserves. That means allowing for drilling in the upper plains area, in Montana and the Dakotas, to recover oil from massive new fields as well. If he wants to preserve the 0.01% of ANWR that would get affected by the drilling, then he had better start taking action to find oil elsewhere.

The gas-tax holiday is a joke. Not only would it do nothing for prices as the demand would increase with the temporary price cut, it would only make the eventual price shock worse when the taxes got reapplied. It would save the average family less than the cost of two tickets to a major-league baseball game over the entire period. In fact, the next price shock would hit right before the election.

We already know where Obama stands on this issue: he likes the high prices, if not the speed at which they arrived. What will John McCain do differently? So far, his campaign and McCain himself have made themselves as clear as mud. We need a clear plan from the McCain campaign that includes massive new efforts to produce domestic supplies of oil, as well as nuclear power and more effort on renewables. They are missing the opportunity of a lifetime on this issue.