Gas taxes in Europe

A nice debate has emerged on the comment board about gas taxes. Some people suggest they should be higher to pay for mass transit and discourage driving. Others say it's a ripoff.

Several commentators have pointed to Europe, where gas taxes average about 60% of the price of a liter of gasoline. If you were to fill up with regular at the Chevron in Pasadena that we've been tracking, the tax today would be about 13.8% of the cost per gallon.

Here's a link to a good story from 2005 from the Christian Science Monitor in which several experts say high gas taxes have pushed many Europeans to more fuel-efficient cars -- something that is politically impossible to do in the U.S.

Interestingly, even as gas prices have also gone up in Europe in recent years, there doesn't seem to be much drop-off in the number of new cars being purchased -- although purchases slipped by 1.7% in the first quarter of this year. Check out the numbers from the European Automobile Manufacturers Assn.

Finally, I would like to direct serious gas tax wonks to a report by the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission. The report was released earlier this year and called for raising the federal gas tax five to eight cents a year for several years and then indexing it to inflation. It also called for more tolling on freeways and a big-time expansion of mass transit.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, who served on the commission, renounced that finding. The commission's argument was that raising the gas tax was the only way to reap money to make transportation infrastructure improvements.

Of course, all of this is intriguing, but it's hard to imagine anything happening with gas taxes at the moment. In Los Angeles County, the most likely source of money for mass transit is a 1/4-cent sales tax increase that local pols may ask voters to consider in November.

--Steve Hymon

Comments

[Hallett Newman]

How can anyone figure that a tax is a good thing? No way will it help the economy, it will only hurt . The Busdh tax cuts put more noney in to the US treasury, much to the confusion of the liberal media.
Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less.