Republicans are jumping on board the "gas tax holiday" train, and I really hope that Democrats will clobber them on this issue before the summer passes and it becomes irrelevant.

On Thursday, House Republican Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said he's supporting a bill by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., to suspend the gasoline tax this summer.

"The common sense plan unveiled today by Rep. Ryan helps bring down gas prices by eliminating the federal gas tax during the summer months so American families can take their summer vacations with less strain on their budgets," Boehner said in a statement Thursday.

Boehner's probably heard that economists don't think it'll amount to much, and he may not put much stock in their pronouncements.

 I can think of two motivations behind this temporary suspection of the gasoline tax: either to bring down prices at the pump, or to hand billions of dollars to the gasoline industry.

Economists have bashed this idea, in large part because its duration is too short for it to stimulate an increase in gasoline supply, meaning that consumer prices will not come down as a result of the tax holiday. This would lead us to believe that this proposal is intended as a give-away to the gasoline industry, but Hillary provides an alternative. She insists that is the President were willing to use all of the powers at his disposal, then he/she could force prices to come down over the summer. Is she referring to price controls?

If a politician is proposing that they can lower gasoline prices in a time-frame as near as this summer, then we basically have to conclude that they are proposing price controls. Since the Republicans are championing these price controls, we have to assume that they expect Americans to behave like Iranians, Nigerians, or the French -- who protest/riot whenever the prices of basic commodities rise.

I had always felt comfortable that Americans were exceptional in having a slightly more sophisticated view of economics, where we allowed the markets to handle economic details (like setting commodity prices) while politics focused on the big picture issues (like poverty). This is part of why I consider Obama's emphasis on a middle-class tax cut to be far superior to Clinton's and the Republican's emphasis on the price of gasoline.

As much as the Republicans thrive on national chauvinism,  they really go out of their way to undermine America's unique heritage and turn us into just another old-world nation (with a national language, a national religion, and government-controlled commodity prices).