To be brief, no.

Jonathan Alter:

Clinton and McCain have learned a destructive lesson from the Bush era: as Bill Clinton said in 2002, it's better politically to be "strong and wrong" than thoughtful and right. The goal is to depict Barack Obama as an out-of-touch elitist. By any means necessary.

I could highlight a long debate among economists on suspending the gas tax, but there is no debate. Not one respectable economist—and not one environmentalist or foreign policy expert—supports the idea, unless they are official members of the Clinton or McCain campaigns (and even some of them privately oppose it). To relieve suffering at the pump, send another rebate check or provide tax credits or something else, but not this.

Steve Benen:

It’s one thing for a good presidential candidate to embrace a bad idea. It’s worse when the candidate knows it’s a bad idea. It’s worse still when the candidate attacks her rival for failing to embrace a bad idea. And it’s the worst when the candidate feels so strongly about the bad idea that she starts running television commercials about it.

And that, unfortunately, is exactly what we have in the case of Hillary Clinton and the “gas-tax holiday.” Her campaign unveiled a new TV ad yesterday in North Carolina and Indiana attacking Obama for not supporting a temporary suspension of the 18.4-cent federal gas tax.

Paul Krugman:

Why doesn’t cutting the gas tax this summer make sense? It’s Econ 101 tax incidence theory: if the supply of a good is more or less unresponsive to the price, the price to consumers will always rise until the quantity demanded falls to match the quantity supplied. Cut taxes, and all that happens is that the pretax price rises by the same amount. The McCain gas tax plan is a giveaway to oil companies, disguised as a gift to consumers.

The Clinton twist is that she proposes paying for the revenue loss with an excess profits tax on oil companies. In one pocket, out the other. So it’s pointless, not evil. But it is pointless, and disappointing.

John Riley:

McCain supports one bad idea that won't work. Obama supports a different bad idea that won't work. Clinton, proving her presidential mettle, supports deploying both bad ideas to not work as part of a package.

They're really all talking about nothing, except they want to be president.

Gerald Prante:

Clinton and McCain are supporting a temporary repeal of the federal gas tax (18.4 cents), which is bad tax policy for a variety of reasons. But Clinton is going a step further. She must have gone to the Sonny Perdue school of economics because she not only wants the gas tax repealed, but she is essentially supporting price controls by saying that she would force the price at the pump to fall by 18.4 cents, with the Federal Trade Commission coming after noncompliant station owners. Clinton is assuming that the price elasticity of demand for gasoline is perfectly inelastic. Yes, that's the same Clinton who says we need a cap-and-trade system (an implicit tax on energy consumption) to reduce consumption of energy.

Brad DeLong:

This is really embarrassing. Barack Obama needs to be the Democratic nominee.