House Democrats pass bill to raise taxes on gas(Socialists and Globalists want even more money)

H.R. 3534, a bill to give our land away to the U.N., passed by a narrow margin. On July 30, 2010, 207 Democrats and two Republicans voted in favor of the bill, and 39 Democrats and 154 Republicans voted against it.

Among many things, this bill exemplifies that bipartisan support in Congress only exists with the Republicans. The other news is that it raises fuel taxes an estimated 5 cents per gallon on gasoline and diesel.

“Section 802 (b) Amount- The amount of the fee shall be, for each barrel or barrel equivalent produced from land that is subject to a lease from which oil or natural gas is produced in a calendar year, $2 per barrel of oil and 20 cents per million BTU of natural gas in 2010 dollars.”

Most Americans are unaware of the amount of taxes included in each gallon of gasoline. According to the American Petroleum Institute, as of July 2010, the national average fuel tax was 47.7 cents per gallon (cpg).

Given that the average vehicle in the United States holds 16 gallons of gasoline, this equates to $7.63 in federal, state, and local taxes paid each and every time you fill up your tank.

If you live in New York, California, Connecticut, or Hawaii, you will pay an average of $10.16 per tank in taxes. This is, of course, what they keep voting for, so they deserve a higher gasoline tax than the rest of us.

Look, Conservatives need to get smarter, and less blind about fuel taxes.

Without them, generally, your car would be sitting in your driveway having no place to go, or at least not very far (there is no Utopian Libertarian revolution that is going to change - in my lifetime- how MOST roads in this country are built and maintained).

So, as a “user fee” (a charge to everyone who uses the roads, collected in the sale of the fuels used to travel the roads) they do provide the dominant element of financing for our roads. They, in essence “subsidize” motor vehicle transportation. That might be a dirty word to Conservatives, but that is in essence what they do.

Where Conservatives SHOULD complain about fuel taxes is:

1. That they should ONLY subsidize/fund the forms of transportation from which they are collected.

2. That they should be sufficient to that purpose but not greater than needed for that purpose.

3. That road projects should enjoy the greatest public scrutiny concerning true general public need, so that road projects are not mere work projects to artificially boost employment, and so that the true priority projects are not fighting for funds with political “earmarks” and special interest projects.

Accept by knowing the general state-by-state fuel tax-revenue, road funding data and what its going for, I do not know that any state fuel tax is “too” high or, in fact, “too” low, for the purposes for which the tax is supposedly collected.

While I appreciate and join the concerns about politicians that rant over transportation fuel “profits”, as they, usually, taking a bigger slice of the transportation fuel bill in fuel taxes, than what is retained by oil companies as profits;

the REAL ECONOMIC question must be - “do we collect in transportation fuel taxes what WE NEED for motor vehicle transportation infrastructure supported by such taxes, or not” (considering the three provisions I noted above).

If we do, then “fuel taxes” are either sufficient or possibly too high. If we don’t, their not.

Meanwhile, politicians need to quit being dishonest about the true cost of supplying oil-fuel products and the true, low, return on revenue that retail oil-product profits amount to. The politicians mount their populist rants due to public perception over fuel prices. But, the truth is that if fuel prices, particularly in the U.S., had kept pace with most of the rest of the economy - inflated as much over the decades - retail gasoline in the U.S. would, legitimately, be selling for more than it does today. If it just kept pace with college tuition, it would sell for $12.93 a gallon (so who is “price gouging” whom??)

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