California Leads by Example -- Highest Gas Taxes in the Nation

Did you see the excellent map of gasoline taxes, state by state, across America, May 6 on the front page of the San Diego Union-Tribune? If you didn't look too closely, or read the entire story you might have missed a salient fact -– we're number one!

Yup, California has the highest total taxes on gas of any of the 50 states (not just "among the highest" as the newspaper writes). As of January, we wealthy West Coast folks paid 63.9 cents of federal and state taxes a gallon, vs. the national average of about 47.0 cents.

Actually, total California state taxes are even worse than it first appears. All gasoline has a federal 18.4 cents a gallon tax. Hence the rest is all state tax. Thus California state tax is 45.5 cents a gallon vs. the average state tax of 28.6 cents. That means that California gas taxes are an outrageous 59% higher than the average of all states.

Dig a bit deeper, and the news gets even more gloomy. California is higher than everyone else in no small part because there's a sales tax on gasoline. Included in that is double taxation -– California drivers pay sales tax on the federal and state excise taxes included in the price of gasoline. And given the push to raise California sales taxes even higher (perhaps targeting the easy-to-calculate 10% sales tax threshold), our gasoline taxes are destined to rise even more.

Want even more bad California gasoline tax news? I'm here to help! Ask any state transportation official about California's highway miles per person, and they'll eagerly tell you that California ranks towards the bottom.

Yet when you ask 'em why we have such low highway availability and the highest gas taxes, they can't seem to come up with a plausible explanation. Of course, the answer is that most of our taxes on gasoline are siphoned off for little-used mass transit, or for general government spending.

And so what is the transportation gurus' solution? Need I say it? More taxes!

Here's the funny part about the Union-Tribune story. The headline is "States join call for gas tax relief." But of course, the California legislature is keen for the FEDERAL government to provide such relief -– no way they will propose cutting the much bigger California gas taxes.

The newspaper used as its source a report from the American Petroleum Institute. You can check out all the states, and be proud that California leads the way. I guess that makes us a "world class state."
http://www.api.org/statistics/fueltaxes/upload/January_2008_gasoline_and...