  Today, The Honz raised the issue of Senator Kerry's "support" of a 50 cent per gallon gas tax. HL has addressed this point before, but I think since Fred's brought it up AGAIN, we have to address it AGAIN. First, here's the source of the story, a urlLink Bush Ad : He (Kerry) supported a 50 cent a gallon gas tax. If Kerry’s tax increase were law, the average family would pay $657 more a year. Presumably, Fred is talking about this. Second, Senator Kerry's urlLink website says this about this story: John Kerry never introduced, co-sponsored or passed a fifty-cent gas tax. But let's be honest, that says nothing about whether he supported such a tax. So we'll have to dig deeper. urlLink Factcheck.org , a group that describes itself as "a nonpartisan, nonprofit, "consumer advocate" for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics" says urlLink this about that claim: Kerry's support for a 50-cent-per-gallon increase in the federal tax on gasoline was so brief and lukewarm that it was barely noted at the time -- a decade ago. One Boston Globe news story from 1994 quotes Kerry as complaining that the Concord Coalition's scorecard had not rated him highly enough as a deficit-cutter: "It doesn’t reflect my $43 billion package of cuts or my support for a 50-cent increase in the gas tax," the Globe quoted Kerry as saying. But neither the Bush-Cheney campaign nor FactCheck.org turned up any direct report of how and when Kerry had actually backed the 50-cent increase.
Kerry sponsored no such bill in the Senate, and did not add his name to a bill offered by Sen. Charles Robb in 1993, to increase the gasoline tax 10 cents per gallon each year for five years. And MSNBC urlLink notes that in 1994: Kerry was referring to a proposal by democratic Sen. Chuck Robb to substitute a dime-a-year increase in the 14.1-cent-a-gallon gasoline tax over five years as Congress looked for ways to cut the deficit.
Kerry never voted for the measure, which was spearheaded by Robb. So Kerry never voted for Senator Robb's measure. So how can The Honz say that he's still supporting the idea? That's a good question for Fred Honsberger to answer, I'd say. What about it, Fred? How is it possible for John Kerry to support a tax that he never voted for? But wait, there's more. An internet search did turn up some interesting things. At the Kerry urlLink dbunker website , they point out that some of the President's own also supported raising gas taxes.
For instance, Attorney General John Ashcroft, when he was Governor of Missouri, signed into law a 6 cent per gallon increase in the state gas tax over four years. At the signing, he hailed the measure as "the great economic development tool of the decade.” [St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 2/21/92] So what do we have here? Fred has been spending a lot of time recently criticising a Senator who, a decade ago, briefly supported a measure that he no longer supports for a tax bill that was introduced by a man who hasn't been a Senator for almost 4 years.
On the other hand, he is silent about the Attorney General who so clearly supported a gas tax increase that he actually signed it into law. That's amazing, Fred. You're dancing so fast, I can't even see your feet move. 
