The federal tax is collected at the refinery. Cost to collect the tax is about $0.009, less than a penny of tax administrative cost per dollar of tax collected.
Because Congress is afraid to raise the tax, alternative means of raising highway repair funds are in the works, most notably the Vehicle Miles Traveled tax (VMT).
The cost to collect VMT is about 20 cents on the dollar. It is a wildly inefficient way to raise funds for federal road repairs.
VMT has one advantage, though, reps in Congress don't have to make a direct vote in favor of raising taxes.
I cannot accept a federal gas tax increase, because about 25 percent of it goes to mass transit — which, until the 1960s, was mostly a private affair — as well as bike paths, beautification and local road projects that shouldn’t see a lick of federal subsidies.
I think that states and private companies are in a much better position to deal with transportation than the federal government, which cannot balance the budget, even to save us from economic and societal collapse.
There is a bill in Congress that would radically reduce the federal gas tax and hand most transportation responsibilities back to the states. It’s a good start.
One would think that if our bright and valuable functionaries of government would spend half as much time on their jobs we put them there for as they do in creating and inventing new ways to tax us without blame to them, we’d all be better off.
I thought that was done at the point of retail sale to the end users. We still import some gasoline and gasoline blending products that would not enter a refinery.