Posted on 05/30/2021 12:27:17 PM PDT by blam
Get ready for $5 per gallon gasoline – especially if you live in California.
At least, that was the contention of a new WSJ op-ed that claims higher taxes and environmental regulations are both driving up the price of gas.
Author Allysia Finley notes that the average cost at the pump in California is now $4.18 a gallon, pointing out that in 2017, Democrats in the state’s legislature raised a tax on each gallon by 20.8 cents over three years.
California drivers are now paying an astonishing average of 63 cents a gallon in state and local taxes, compared an average of 36.8 cents elsewhere in the country.
The reasoning for the price hike was to repair the state’s infrastructure, but instead the proceeds have been “directed toward projects aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, such as bike lanes and mass transit,” the op-ed notes.
The California Air Resources Board is also responsible for imposing a tax through its cap and trade program, which has added about 14 cents per gallon to the state’s average gas price.
CARB requires that retailers sell “a special extra-clean-burning gasoline blend” which raises the price about another 10 cents per gallon. The Board “assigns carbon-intensity scores to hundreds of fuels” and requires refiners to meet a low score to blend lower-carbon fuels. If they can’t meet the threshold, they are forced to buy carbon credits, which also drives up the price of fuel.
The board awards these credits to utilities when their customers charge EVs at home. Utilities then turn around and sell the credits to refiners. Gas powered vehicle drivers are subsidizing thousands in incentives to EV buyers, the op-ed notes:
So Californians can get a $1,500 rebate from their local utility on top of $2,000 from the state and $7,500 from the feds for buying an electric vehicle. Sweet.
Yet drivers of gasoline-powered cars are subsidizing the utility rebates through higher fuel prices. As the state’s carbon-intensity benchmark has fallen, prices for regulatory credit prices have soared—from $17 on average in 2012 to $198 in the first quarter of this year. An analysis last fall by Stillwater Associates estimated that the program would add 24 cents a gallon to the price of gasoline this year and 63 cents by 2030.
Refiners, as a result of the rules in the state, are switching to producing renewable fuels, which are now “much more profitable” due to regulatory and tax credits. But the infrastructure conversion that refineries will have to undertake to produce this fuel – such as Marathon Petroleum recent planning to convert a refinery in California – will once again wind up in rising prices for California drivers.
In fact, many refineries have simply closed due to the burdensome regulations. This means that when the remaining refineries experience outages, price spikes are more severe.
(snip)
If this country gets turned around from biden onslaught, it’s gonna take a dictator like attitude at the helm.
The rioters in any state...take them off the streets.. in any way... no more patience for what they do.. it sets a habit and makes it legal to them, to set fire and destroy.
Divide the facebooks and twitters.. cut their size and tax.. they overstepped big time.
Take the media’s privileges..
Round up the guilty and try them all!!!!@
For starters
Gov of Fl laid down some edicts... let’s do more!
All going to plan. It’s 4.59 for premium in my community (Magalia Ca.)
Gas is already $5 in California.
Right now we are in a Inflation Cycle because if the Idiot Way we handled the Covid-19 crisis. The foundation was laid in March of 2020 with the Lockdowns and other bad policies. I am sorry but Trump owns this and Biden has taken this and Doubled Down on it with this huge deficits.
Real Interest rates should be up and The Fed has to do something, but they are trapped and cannot raise interest rates without blowing up the Markets and the Country.
Cheating has consequences. Personally, I am willing to pay extra for stuff. I will eat beans and rice if it will help people wake up to what a one party government is going to change lives for worse. Oh yeah. Let’s get more stimulus money just watch it go down tube in inflation.
Illegals hit hardest. s/
It amazes me how people are stupid enough to cheer for higher taxes on businesses without realizing that business revenues come from consumers...you and me.
A lot of people just don’t think it through. They think, perhaps prodded by political rhetoric, that major companies such as Walmart are sitting on billions of dollars in the bank, and that they will pay tax increases out of the alleged billions they are sitting on.
Many people don’t understand about profit margins either. Many businesses have narrow profit margins, and the only realistic way to pay increased business taxes is by increases in the price of the goods and services they provide.
They hear political rhetoric about these issues, but very few people have studied the financial statements of a business, or appreciate that businesses aren’t just sitting on piles of money.
5$ gas should kill the Democrats in the mid-terms.
We’ll all be dead if we have to wait 19 months to get rid of those assholes!
The bastards are doing their best to give us to go electric. Don’t be surprised if it goes to 8 bucks a gal in the near future. DJT predicted higher prices and taxes, yet the morons voted for the demented old pervert.
Exactly. This is THE reason why energy independence is the most important independence for productive and affordable commerce and successful middle class. Without affordable US energy, GASOLINE andOUL (sorry battery loving electric eaters...you can’t cut it yet) drives industry and ease of sustainability for every single one of us.
Exactly. This is THE reason why energy independence is the most important independence for productive and affordable commerce and successful middle class. Without affordable US energy, GASOLINE andOUL (sorry battery loving electric eaters...you can’t cut it yet) drives industry and ease of sustainability for every single one of us.
But I thought the Associated Press fact checked this and said it is not Biden who did it. All Biden did at first was to immediately kill the Keystone pipeline which fed crude to refineries in the South. Crude now has to be delived overland by tanker truck or rail car and the price started to climb at that point. So much for Associated Press credibility.
Not nearly high enough to suit the #woke upper-class #progressives.
You are kind compared to what I would fo, and I mean it too.
You are kind compared to what I would fo, and I mean it too.
If any democrats you know complain about the gas prices, remind them that this is what they voted for.
This is not a bug, but a feature
Let me add what I would do to the rioters
I would warn.. that is all the help they’d get...
Rubber bullets first... then the real thing...
Thdy have been treated like children by parents who don’t know how to discipline.. and they acted like brats with no conscience nor soul.
“Transitory”
Lots of dems are saying right now as they are filling up their tanks - “Things were better under Trump. Too bad he was such a mean tweeter.”
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I used to be appalled to hear otherwise intelligent people whining and bitching about President Trump’s inclination to tweet to the world his thoughts regarding contemporary issues, because I was so delighted to have a President who was unafraid to say exactly what he was thinking about any subject that had his attention. Now look at what 2020 stolen election foisted upon America. DISGUSTING, IS IT NOT?
It amazes me how people are stupid enough to cheer for higher taxes on businesses without realizing that business revenues come from consumers...you and me.
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Stupidity is a way to describe what causes some people to think and act irrationally, and it is primarily the result of the long-term anti-capitalist, Marxist indoctrination that has become so pervasive in America today.
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