[The stream has ended.]
President Joe Biden on Wednesday Called Congress to make a federal holiday for three months For gas and diesel fuel taxes.
Biden also asked individual states to suspend their own tariffs on gas and diesel.
The move comes a week after the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States reached $5 for the first time.
Biden last week linked rising gas prices with many Americans’ pessimistic view of where the country was headed.
“If you notice, by the time gas prices started rising,” Biden said during an Associated Press interview, “things were a lot more optimistic.”
There is a 18.4 cents-per-gallon federal tax on gas and a 24.4 cents-per-gallon federal tax on diesel fuel.
Biden’s fellow Democrat, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, has repeatedly questioned the wisdom of cutting federal taxes on fuel.
While that’s “good PR,” Pelosi said in April, “there’s no guarantee that the savings, the federal tax reduction, will be passed on to the consumer.”