President Trump’s proposal to temporarily suspend the federal gasoline tax is drawing support from red state governments but conspicuous silence from blue state governors who found the same idea politically essential when Biden was in the White House.
Economist Stephen Moore, co-author of The Trump Economic Miracle with Art Laffer, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to note the disparity and discuss what it reveals about the underlying ideology of blue state tax policy.
Proft had raised the specific case of Governor Pritzker, who not only suspended the Illinois state gas tax under Biden but required gas stations to post signs advertising the suspension in what was transparently an effort to provide political cover for Biden amid spiraling fuel prices. Now, with Trump proposing the same approach and Illinois motorists facing the second-highest state gas tax in the country at sixty-six cents per gallon, Pritzker is declining to act, citing the need for infrastructure funding. Moore said that contrast tells a big story, and that the states with the highest gas taxes, Illinois, California at approximately seventy cents, New York, all have one thing in common: their political leadership views gasoline taxes not as necessary revenue instruments but as tools for making fossil fuel use more expensive and less attractive, regardless of the burden on ordinary drivers. Moore said he supports a temporary federal gas tax suspension and thinks states should follow suit, with the option to reinstate once global energy price pressures ease.
He said Proft’s note about Illinois double-taxing gasoline, applying a sales tax on top of the existing gas tax in a practice most states do not follow, is a characteristically devious approach to extracting maximum revenue from a product the state’s political class publicly claims to want to see eliminated. He said Chicago and Illinois routinely carry the second-highest gas prices in the nation behind California for exactly this reason, and that the greedy oil companies narrative preferred by Springfield politicians is contradicted by the fact that the largest single variable explaining Illinois’s premium at the pump is state tax policy.
The conversation moved to minimum wage, prompted by a newsletter item Moore had highlighted referencing a famous New York Times editorial from forty years ago titled The Correct Minimum Wage Is Zero, noting the irony that the same editorial board now functions as an incubator for advocacy of twenty-five-dollar-per-hour federal minimums. Moore said he does not object to a modest minimum wage but that at the levels currently being pushed by AOC in the House and Bernie Sanders in the Senate, independent estimates suggest five to ten million jobs would be destroyed, with the heaviest impact falling on lower-skilled Hispanic workers who would simply be priced out of employment rather than elevated into higher wages. He said the louder voice in the Democratic Party today is clearly AOC and Sanders rather than anyone resembling a moderate, and said he views her as a serious 2028 presidential contender.
On the Los Angeles mayor’s race and Spencer Pratt’s latest campaign advertisement, which satirizes the city’s approach to homelessness and drug addiction through the voices of characters whose daily routines revolve around enabling them, Moore said he has always found Karen Bass’s program compelling in a grim way. He said there is mounting evidence, beyond the arsonist inspiration story already reported, that the Pacific Palisades fires were allowed to spread with less urgency than would have been applied in other neighborhoods because the affected residents were wealthy, a prioritization of outcomes that reflects the ideological disposition of the current city leadership. He noted that Palisades homes were adjacent to the Pacific Ocean and asked rhetorically how any government runs out of water under those geographic circumstances.
On the inflation data released this week, Moore said rising oil and gas prices are working their way through the economy in exactly the ways economic theory predicts, affecting not just pump prices but airline tickets, freight costs, and the hundreds of products manufactured using petroleum derivatives. He said Trump is right to press for a resolution to the strait situation and noted that China is more dependent on Middle Eastern oil than the United States is, yet has done nothing meaningful to help reopen the strait, a point he said Trump should press hard in Beijing along with the broader case that China is cheating on trade, stealing intellectual property, and behaving as an economic and increasingly military adversary rather than a responsible trading partner.