Gas Is Cheap!
Check out this bar graph on A Penny Saved… on gas prices in 2005, check out how much less we pay for gasoline than the rest of the world. Now, it should be noted that since all countries pay roughly the same wholesale price for petroleum, the difference comes in taxes. European nations have always had much higher taxes than the United States because many of them have nationalized healthcare, family incentives, and all sorts of other government (common-use) assistance programs (for example in Germany, the government will give you money to subsidize starting a family and buying a home). All those assistance programs have to be funded by something so it would be understandable gasoline prices are much higher there.
You can’t really look at the graph and draw any far reaching conclusions but it is interesting to wonder what it would be like if, in an effort to affect consumer behavior, jacked up the taxes so that we were paying $6/gallon in gas. Detroit wouldn’t like that very much.
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5 Comments - Share Your Thoughts
The rest of the world looks bad but the goverments are really nailing them with taxes so they get free transportation and other services like in the UK. The rest of the world is buying the oil for the same price.
[...] Blueprint for Financial Prosperity says gas is cheap, but I guess the meaning a relative term like “cheap” depends on your basis for comparison. Mighty Bargain Hunter has some tips for hoding yard sales. [...]
European nations and Japan make much more extensive use of public transportation systems generally, in particular trains, which are fairly energy efficient means of moving people and goods. Those gasoline taxes do get put to better use than in the US. I’m not justifying 70% income tax rates and obscenely high corporate tax rates, which is where the largest portion of the subsidized health care budget probably comes from, I would imagine. (The supply siders should go hawking their wares in France, if they dare.) But providing a data point without full context is a bit misleading, methinks. There’re probably a lot of bits we’ve left out of this conversation as well.
More bias for the fire from http://tinyurl.com/r2qly –
“A tenacious economist with the National Defense Council
Foundation–a right-of-center Washington think tank–Copulos spent
18 solid months poring over hundreds of thousands of pages of
government documents, toiling to fix a price tag on America’s
addiction to global crude. He parsed oil-related defense spending
in the Middle East. He calculated U.S. jobs and investments lost
to steep crude prices. He even factored in the lifelong medical
bills of some 18,000 U.S. troops wounded in Iraq as of March.
(About $1.5 million each.)
“Copulos is a highly respected analyst in Washington. And his
exhaustive findings flabbergasted the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee this spring.
“The actual cost of gasoline refined from imported oil, according
to Copulos?
“Eight dollars a gallon.”
“Consumers don’t dodge the bill for all these masked expenditures.
Instead, they pay for them indirectly, through higher taxes, or by
saddling their children and grandchildren with a ballooning
national debt–one that’s increasingly financed by foreigners. The
result: Unaware of the true costs of their oil habit, U.S.
motorists see no obvious reason to curb their energy gluttony.
“‘Gas isn’t too expensive,’” said Copulos. ‘It’s way, way too cheap.’”
[...] Blueprint for Financial Prosperity says gas is cheap! [...]
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