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Don’t get me wrong.

If someone offers to save me a couple hundred bucks a year in taxes, I’m all ears.

But U.S. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart’s proposed tax write-off for commuters is only that, a couple hundred bucks a year off an income tax bill. It’s not a substitute for an aggressive energy program that will provide a long-term solution to America’s debilitating addiction to foreign oil.

On Monday, Diaz-Balart, who represents eastern Collier County in Washington, D.C., unveiled a proposed bill that would allow commuters to write off the money they spend for gasoline driving to and from work.

He calls it CARS, for Commuter Aid and Relief for Suburbs.

The basic idea is that commuters could take a tax exemption for the miles driven to work and back similar to the way workers who drive on the job can write off their mileage.

The resulting savings on annual income taxes would be welcomed in the age of $3.50 gas. But the bill could burden taxpayers with one more form to fill out, one more pile of receipts to sort through at tax time. Further, the tax write-off would do nothing to fix the underlying problem.

Diaz-Balart concedes CARS is merely one idea in what he describes as a three-tiered approach to controlling high energy prices.

CARS is strictly a short-term fix to save working people some money.

Over the long term, “It is essential for the economy and our security to find alternate sources of energy.”

And in the mid-term, “We (America) haven’t built a refinery or nuclear plant in 30 years.”

No one would disagree with the congressman’s long-term conclusion about alternatives. And more refineries would help increase the supply of fuel.

But what are they going to refine? Oil bought at $150 a barrel?

Missing from Diaz-Balart’s fuel fix is increased production of domestic oil, specifically that oil believed to be in the eastern Gulf of Mexico.

He was a key player in the effort to put what had been a year-to-year ban on eastern Gulf oil exploration into law.

Even with the cost of oil skyrocketing and gasoline threatening to hit $4 a gallon, Diaz-Balart isn’t budging.

Diaz-Balart sounds like a man conflicted on the issue of energy independence and offshore drilling.

He simultaneously seeks to end our reliance on oil from the Middle East and Venezuela, while at the same time maintaining his insistence that oil rigs come no closer than the roughly 100 miles they’re kept off the state’s west coast. “We’re finding out ethanol is not a panacea. The panacea is getting out of this addiction to foreign oil.”

At what price would he consider a change in the law to allow more access to the eastern Gulf oil reserves? He doesn’t know, except to say, “We’re not there yet.”

If people driving to work are paying $4 a gallon for gasoline, tax write-off or no tax write-off, surely we must be getting close.

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E-mail Brent Batten at bebatten@naplesnews.com