Hands Across the Border

Gas Watch

Bush also got a question about skyrocketing gas prices.

Q: "Thank you, Mr. President. Oil prices today rose above $118 a barrel. It's another record. Are Saudi Arabia and other oil producers -- are they our adversaries, or have you had any success with your recent appeals with them? And also, the effect of the gasoline prices, isn't that about to erase or certainly erode the benefit of the economic stimulus package?"

Bush: "No question rising gasoline prices are like a tax on our working people. And what's happening is, is that we've had an energy policy that neglected hydrocarbons in the United States for a long period of time, and now we're paying the price. We should have been exploring for oil and gas in ANWR, for example. But, no, we made the decision -- our Congress kept preventing us from opening up new areas to explore in environmentally friendly ways. And now we're becoming, as a result, more and more dependent on foreign sources of oil. . . .

"I'm -- I'm obviously concerned for our consumers. All the more reason to have passed a rebate, tax relief. And all the more reason for the United States Congress to keep the tax relief I passed permanent. . . . In a time of rising gasoline prices, we need to be sending a message to all Americans, we're not going to raise your taxes."

But maybe there's something else he could do.

Matthew Hay Brown blogs for Tribune: "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, under fire from House Republicans for failing to contain rising gas prices, is appealing to President Bush for help.

"In a letter today, the California Democrat asks Bush to direct the Justice Department to investigate oil cartel price-fixing, authorize the Federal Trade Commission to pursue and punish 'price gougers,' end tax breaks for oil companies and invest the savings in renewable energy.

"'Lastly, your administration must use the authority given to it by the Congress to end market manipulation,' Pelosi writes. 'We cannot wait to act in the face of these price increases.'"

Speaking of Tax Cuts

The White House press office called attention in an e-mail to reporters this morning to a piece by former Bush aide Peter Wehner on the National Review Web site.

Wehner writes: "In a recent article in the Financial Times, Clive Crook wrote about the fiscal consequences of the Bush administration. According to Crook, 'With ill-designed tax cuts and reeling indiscipline on spending (partly, but not only, because of the war) the Bush Administration turned this [surplus] into a deficit.' He wrote about the 'fiscal incontinence of the Bush administration' and that 'Mr. Bush has done the cause of fiscal moderation grave harm.'"

Wehner calls Crook "shallow and uninformed in this analysis."

The crux of Wehner's counter-argument is this: "If President Bush's tax cuts had not been enacted into law, the economy during the last seven years would have been weaker, growth would have been slower, and therefore the deficit may well have been larger."