You may have heard about how McCain, and now McClinton both support a “gas tax holiday” for this summer, and argue that Obama is “out of touch” with regular Americans because he opposes the “tax cut.” The problem: the tax cut is so limited, in fact nearly worthless, that it works only as an election-year gimmick, not an actual solution to any problem. The tax stands at 18.6 cents per gallon, where gas costs $3.60 on average in the U.S. today. Let’s say that your gas tank holds 15 gallons and you pay the average price; you will save only $2.79 on a $54 refill. Wow! What a savings! That should fix a lot of people’s financial problems!

Truth is, you could probably save more money right now just by going to one of those web sites that finds the lowest gas prices, and save ten to fifteen cents per gallon that way. In my old ZIP code, there is a 23-cent-per-gallon difference between the highest and the lowest gas prices at stations within just a few miles of each other.

In short, the McCain/Clinton proposal is nothing more than hot air; Obama has got to be respected for speaking truth on this one, in contrast with Clinton’s jumping on the McCain publicity-stunt bandwagon:

Mr. Obama derided the McCain-Clinton idea of a federal tax holiday as a “short-term, quick-fix” proposal that would do more harm than good, and said the money, which is earmarked for the federal highway trust fund, is badly needed to maintain the nation’s roads and bridges.

In 2000, Mr. Obama supported a bill in the Illinois legislature to suspend most of the state’s 6.25 percent gasoline sales tax. But he later opposed making the reduction permanent, arguing that the state needed the revenue and that the measure had saved consumers little.

Mrs. Clinton, of New York, has also taken varying stands on the issue of gas taxes. In her 2000 Senate campaign, she spoke against repealing the federal gasoline tax, calling it “one of those few taxes that New York actually gets more money from Washington than we send.”

At a meeting with voters in North Carolina on Monday, Mr. Obama said lifting the gas tax for three months would save the average consumer no more than $30, a figure confirmed by Congressional analysts. Mr. Obama has previously dismissed Mr. McCain’s proposal as a “scheme.”

“Half a tank of gas,” Mr. Obama told his audience. “That’s his big solution.”

Well-put. Naturally, the Liberal Media™ will probably report that Obama is costing you money and how Clinton is successfully pulling for the little guy. Because the media is now far less about reporting facts than it is about branding images for profit.

Update: I was thinking of adding this when I wrote the above post, but couldn’t think of a way to phrase it succinctly and convincingly; Krugman, in a rare moment of not baiting Obama, put it extremely well:

if the supply of a good is more or less unresponsive to the price, the price to consumers will always rise until the quantity demanded falls to match the quantity supplied. Cut taxes, and all that happens is that the pretax price rises by the same amount. The McCain gas tax plan is a giveaway to oil companies, disguised as a gift to consumers.

Forgive me the omission.