Posted on 05/07/2011 8:26:00 AM PDT by originalbuckeye
Can anyone provide a current breakdown of gas prices? I want to forward to my friends who think that Big Oil is the big winner when prices spike up. I'm assuming that all the Fed, State and Local taxes are the main reason. Thanks.
This is truly disgusting.
Not really. The government gets 18.4 cents per gallon. Therefore, regardless of the price of a gallon of gas, the feds still only get 18.4 cents per gallon.
No, the oil companies make 7%, so if a gallon is $4 they only make $0.28. The federal gasoline tax is 18.4 cents per gallon, hence they only get 18.4 cents regardless of the price of gas.
Now if the price of gas is $2, then the companies only make 14 cents and the Feds make 18.4 cents and that certainly isn’t fair to the oil companies that spend billions to go into hostile environments to drill for oil for the betterment of people.
Snip: Gas prices keep rising nationwide. But how much you actually pay is affected by your income and local economy. Mississippi residents spend a whopping 14.2% of their income on gas.
the federal excise tax and state highway taxes are charged per gallon. here in illinois, additional state, county, and city SALES taxes are charged per dollar, including the per gallon taxes charges. so we get to pay tax on tax.
What states charge sales tax on gasoline. I’ve traveled in all 50 of them and don’t ever remember paying more inside than it says on the pump.
Thanks so much. I did a search on Yahoo and the articles that came up were all old and set the Big Oil companies profit at 65% but it looks like maybe that is actually the crude profit. Thanks again.
Whoever owns the actual oil is the winner. Without going into the weeds, the tax on fuel is mostly per gallon sold. The Southland Corporation (7-11) went into the fuel business claiming they could get by on a nickel per gallon margin on retail sales. They went broke, but not before killing the retail fuel business. The refinery makes a certain amount of money. There are transportation costs. I’ve never seen an oil contract, so I don’t know if the mineral rights holder is on a sliding scale or not. They may just get a set price per barrel. Get a bunch of neighbors together and start a cooperative. Then, hire an exploration team; buy mineral rights; hire a drilling team; build pipelines; build a refinery; build more pipelines; build a wholesale fuel distribution point; buy a fleet of transport trucks; build stations; fight with the government, property owners and environmentalists about everything, and there you have it.
Try searching Finance.Yahoo.Com for ticker symbol XOM for example. You will find that they are nearly always in the 0-10% profit range and usually around 7-8%.
One of the big problems is the EPA mandated boutique gasolines that kick in every spring. This is described in the media as “Summer Driving Season” which is a misnomer. It’s not that people drive more in the summer (or not much). It’s that due to EPA regulations, instead of a couple of types of gasoline there are now more like 100 depending on your region. This produces artificial shortages, due to the havoc it wreaks on the refineries and the pipelines.
What would be very interesting (I’ll ping thackney to this thread) would be a multi-year graph of the spread between crude and gasoline on a month to month basis. My bet is that this spread typically enlarges in the spring and summer months due to what I’m describing. This is almost NEVER mentioned in the MSM I guess cause they don’t want you to know.
You can’t fully analyze this over a period of just a few weeks. Gas prices go up and down. Oil prices go up and down. They don’t always do exactly what you might predict. You’ve got to look at it over a period of years. One of the reasons oil companies are making a lot of money right now is that during the 90’s, they took a bath, losing hundreds of billions of dollars, and a lot of them went out of business. The current high profit environment is the result of their competition going out of business, and it to some degree makes up for the bath they took in the 90’s. So yes, they are making a lot of money, and that is good. It means that in the long run, they can stay in business, and we can continue to have gasoline.
Whether 18.4 cents or, as another poster wrote, 42 cents per gallon, it is still a windfall profit for the government compared to what the oil companies get from doing the actual R&D, drilling, and refining.
It’s been mentioned here that in IL there are sales taxes on gas.
http://illinoishomepage.net/fulltext/?nxd_id=245117
mentions there are 7 states that charge a sales tax. You likely have not noticed this because the sales tax is included in the price per gallon at the pump.
I’ve never seen an oil contract, so I don’t know if the mineral rights holder is on a sliding scale or not.
The contracts I’ve seen provide for the mineral rights owner to get a percent of the crude production output (1/8th, 1/6th, 1/4th, etc). The net return in dollars to the mineral rights holder would slide up/down I guess based upon what the crude market is at that time.
In 2010, Exxonmobile made just over 2 cents/gallon in profit on all fuel sales in America. The fed gov takes 18.4 cents/gallon for gas and 24.4 cents/gallon for diesel. It also taxes jet fuel. The states add to that. The average fuel tax per gallon is 48.1 cents for gasoline. More for diesel. Less for jet fuel. So, who's really screwing us?
Or there's this:
http://www.taxadmin.org/fta/rate/mf.pdf that breaks down state fuel tax rates.
Here's another site for fuel taxes by state: http://www.commonsensejunction.com/notes/gas-tax-rate.html
Here's a good pdf file that breaks down fuel taxes, other state taxes, and the combined rate of state and fed by state. http://www.easy-tax-information.com/support-files/gasoline-taxes-by-state-january-2011.pdf
Again, this is with the reminder that ExxonMobile made just over 2 cents/gallon profit on fuel last year.
You are not wrong. Most are. Every state charges an excise tax per gallon, that rate is a fixed rate, regardless of prices. However, 30 some-odd states also attach other fees, some may be fixed, but many are variable, based on the cost of fuel (sales/use taxes). See my post 35, last link, for that breakdown.
You would be surprised at all of the taxes levied before it gets to where it’s going.
Figures do not lie, but the people that use them do.
Thank you.
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