April 27, 2006

Gas Prices

Richard Combs has the essential information on the higher gas prices of late. He reminds us John Kerrey was advocating a 50 cent increase per gallon of gas. Democrats are now asking for investigations into price gouging. Conclusion; price gouging by businesses, bad. By government, Okey-dokey!

Also:

The federal excise tax on gasoline already adds twice as much (18 cents) to each gallon as the average oil company's profit (9 cents), and most state excise taxes are far higher than that. Now, it turns out that almost half of ExxonMobile's profit went to the tax man, too!

Of course if we're ever to lose our dependency on oil, high oil prices will be the catalyst. There's no better way to spread incentives to find alternative fuels.

Posted by Walter at April 27, 2006 09:16 PM
Comments

Have you ever looked at a map of gas prices in the United Stated based on county? Have you compared it to the results shown on a map showing the winning presidential candidate by county?

Posted by: Jason Spalding at April 27, 2006 09:37 PM

I just checked out the map of gas prices and I didn't really see anything weird from county to county. http://www.gasbuddy.com/gb_gastemperaturemap.aspx

For example in Ohio (my state) Cincinnati is a big Republican area and Cleveland is a big Democratic area and the gas prices are the same. What should I have seen?

Posted by: Joe at April 28, 2006 08:26 AM

State by state it looks like Republican voting states have cheaper gas prices. Jason, are you implying the Prez is sticking it to Democrats? That would be hilarious.

The more plausible explanation is lower taxes in Republican leaning states.

Posted by: Walter at April 28, 2006 10:48 AM