Last week, Gov. Christine Gregoire proposed legislative hearings in October to, among other things, “study the high price of gas and diesel fuels.”

Just about every national event has become an excuse to raise oil prices, whether it is the Iraq war, the natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina, or the human-created disaster of its aftermath. But the true cost of that gasoline is based on crude oil from wells developed years ago.

When oil companies decide to push up prices at the pump, sometimes twice in the same day, they are gouging us. This is only good news for those who want to repeal the recent gas tax increase to fund infrastructure improvements. If you can’t take your anger out on the real culprits, then let’s go after taxes and government.

That’s what House Republicans have proposed: They want to suspend the gas tax for three months, robbing the state’s transportation infrastructure of $266 million.

This proposal amounts to a transfer of public revenue to the windfall profits of Exxon/Mobil.

In Louisiana, neglecting the physical infrastructure cost thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars in economic losses. Katrina brought Abraham Lincoln’s words to mind: “You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.” And yet, this is exactly what the proponents of Initiative 912 intend.

The gas tax funds projects as big as making the Alaska Way Viaduct able to withstand a major earthquake and as small as installing cable guardrails to reduce head-on collisions on Highway 410 in Bonney Lake.

In the Tri-Cities, the money will be used to construct passing lanes, reduce collisions and save lives on Highway 24.

Each county gets money to work on transportation infrastructure, safety and mobility projects. With the new gas tax, the Puget Sound region raises $14.3 billion in total transportation revenues over the next 16 years and spends $14.3 billion. The rest of the state raises $13.8 billion and spends $13.8 billion.

To do this, the gas tax will rise 3 cents per gallon next year, 2 cents in 2007 and 1.5 cents in 2008.

With this year’s tax contribution in place, the gas tax is 25 percent less than what we paid in the 1960s. In fact, the tax collected per vehicle mile dropped more than 10 percent between 1980 and 2004.

Let’s not confuse the cost of gas with the gas tax. Gas prices skyrocketed in August and September. That didn’t have anything to do with the gas tax. In fact, the gas tax did not budge during that time. It had everything to do with the near-monopoly control that Exxon/Mobil, BP and five other oil companies have over supply and price. In the second quarter of this year, Exxon made more than $7.6 billion in profits and Chevron pulled in more than $3.6 billion. That was before the summer and the wrath of Katrina provided them with more excuses.

So what can we do? Hawaii provides us with a good example. As of this month, Hawaii is capping the price on wholesale gasoline, including taxes. The Legislature could do the same thing here. That way, we could tamp down the price we pay at the pump while at the same time paying the taxes necessary to maintain our transportation infrastructure.

In Hawaii, Chevron said the law “is flawed and not in the best interest of the state,” and Tesoro said any cap “will only serve to distort market forces.”

But anyone who believes in free market capitalism will realize that the oil companies left that era behind long ago. Now they exercise near-monopoly market and pricing power. A cap would not only help consumers, it would also help the private economy, from Boeing and the airline industry to the local grocery store that depends on on-time and economical deliveries.

We all pay for Exxon/Mobil’s profits, and that makes the bottom line harder to meet for many employers. With the federal government in the hands of the oil companies, a price cap won’t be coming out of D.C. any time soon. It is up to us to put one in place, so we can protect our pocketbooks while investing in transportation for economic growth and to protect life and limb. It is worth a special session to put that in place.

John Burbank, executive director of the Economic Opportunity Institute (www. eoionline.org), writes every other Wednesday. Write to him c/o the institute at 1900 Northlake Way, Suite 237, Seattle, WA 98103. His e-mail address is john@eoionline.org.