"Joseph A. Orsini" <Joeman@gbonline.com> wrote:
: Government taxes on gas are
: not going to go away, how do you think the roads you drive on are funded?
: Plowing, repair, maintenance, new construction all takes money and on the
: state level there are usually provisions on gas tax that ear mark them for
: road expenses.
True, but a lot of these gas taxes don't get used for anything transportation
related. (I'm a member of the National Motorists Association and they are always
harping about this - taxes, tolls and fees which are supposed to be earmarked
to maintain the infrastructure somehow find their way off into completely
unrelated areas, or just dumped into the general coffer. Sort've how the
lottery systems were justified by saying the profits would go directly to
education, but they sure don't anymore...) With a modicum of efficiency, the
gov't could maintain the same level of public works service on a much smaller
tax percentage. IMHO, the only tax on fuel should be sales tax, and if your
state doesn't have them, then there'd be no tax. 30 and 40 percent taxes on
a product, (especially one as necessary as gasoline), is outrageous.
: Where the government needs to get it's "stuff" together is eliminating the
: 12 or so different blends used around the country (this excludes Kalifornia
: because that one state alone regulates something like 26 different blends of
: gas based on county or air quality or some other BS) like here in Wisconsin
: we have some counties that mandate the 10% ethanol blend and some don't, we
: also have to have a "winter" blend that is supposed to be more resistant to
: freezing. All these different blends make it hard for refineries to
: efficiently produce gas from crude. If there were say 2 or 3 different
: blends it would allow the gas to go to the part of the country where demand
: was highest, as it is now if a refinery has extra gas for say Florida but it
: is a special blend they need to sit on it until it can be sold in Florida,
: whereas if there were just a few universal blends they could ship it to say
: Georgia.
Good point. I only recently learned about this particular problem and
I was blown away. A gas shortage in one part of the country can't be supplied
by a surplus in another part, because the area that has the shortage won't
allow the different blend to be sold there. Essentially, the area has to wait
until the refineries can create their blend from scratch. Having all these
different government mandated blends is insane, and needs to stop! The
elimination of that factor alone would probably go a long way towards
dropping gas prices.
--
-Jon-
.-- Jon Steiger --- jon@dakota-truck.net or jon@jonsteiger.com --.
| '70 Barracuda, '90 Dakota Convertible, '92 Ram 4x4, '96 Dakota |
| '96 Intruder, '96 Kolb FireFly, '99 Cherokee, '01 Ram 3500 |
`----------------------------------- http://www.jonsteiger.com --'
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Oct 01 2005 - 12:50:23 EDT