Youngkin’s gas tax holiday may not actually lower your price at the pump

Gov. Glenn Youngkin is admitting that his proposed gas tax holiday won’t guarantee savings for Virginia consumers, but we do know it will guarantee one thing: headaches on our commutes.

This $400 million gas tax holiday idea from our new governor will be one of the big-ticket items at the special session of the Virginia General Assembly set to begin next week.

The Youngkin proposal would eliminate the state’s 26-cent-per-gallon gas tax for 90 days, then phase it back into effect by the end of the summer.

Depending on the size of your gas tank, you’d save between $4 and $6 per fill-up, assuming that there’s a trickle-down.

But there lies the potential rub. Because, see, the gas tax isn’t assessed directly at the pump, but rather on fuel distributors.

Ideally, it would then be passed on to you at the pump, but as Youngkin conceded in an interview with WRIC-TV in Richmond this week, this isn’t guaranteed.

“We have an incredibly competitive industry in Virginia, and let’s just be clear, people aren’t making money with high crude oil prices right now. They get pinched through the whole system, and that competition actually results in the lowest prices possible,” Youngkin said.

There’s your Republican governor, sympathizing with the fossil-fuel barons about how they’re not adding to their record profits from high crude oil prices resulting from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the response from the West sanctioning Russia.

So, we may get a few cents off per gallon with this tax break for fuel distributors, we may not, if the distributors decide to heed Youngkin’s call for them to make more money off the current global tensions.

It’s not a war if there’s no profiteering, right?

The one thing that’s for sure is the $400 million that the state won’t be collecting this spring and summer in gas taxes won’t be going to the state roads budget.

“Our transportation system is going to get decimated,” Virginians for High Speed Rail Executive Director Danny Plaugher told WRIC-TV. “Virginia is the only state who is proposing a gas tax holiday that’s not also back filling transportation revenue. We’re also the only state that’s proposing it that’s also cutting another stream of transportation funding, and that’s the grocery tax, at the exact same time.”

Plaugher projects that the tax cut proposals could remove up to $2 billion in transportation revenue over the next six years.

What that means for you: less money for basic maintenance, and for new projects to reduce congestion and build up alternatives like rail.

They’re going to do it, because politics, but it’s not going to do much of anything to affect your bottom line, it’s likely to make fuel distributors even more money, and it’s going to hamstring ongoing efforts to make transportation less stressful.

A real winner, this idea.

Story by Chris Graham