Driving Less

I just cannot shake this gas price thing.  I took the data from NationMaster and converted a few of the notable countries to cost per gallon at the pump:

Some people say that we have so much money in America that even if we doubled the gas price, consumption would not change.  I think we should give that a try.  We currently use 378 million gallons of gasoline per day so a $3.00 per gallon gas tax (in addition to current taxes) would raise $137 Billion in tax revenue each year.  Sure, maybe our consumption would go down -- which would also be good  -- so let's call it $100 Billion.

That would not quite pay for the interest on the national debt ($164B), but it would pay for the State Department ($51B) and HUD ($47B).  See the Wikipedia page on the 2010 budget here. 

Hanging Out with Nambia and Bangladesh

In the event you are interested in knowing where we stand on gasoline taxes and the resulting price at the pump, there is a great website that you should check out called NationMaster.  There you can see a chart comparing us to all other nations.

It turns out that in America we pay 77% of the worldwide average price for gasoline.  Sounds pretty good until you look more closely and see who we are hanging out with on the list:

It seems like the weaker the government, the lower the gas price.  Gotta keep the people happy I guess.  All of the way at the bottom are Venezuela, Iran, Iraq, and Turkmenistan.  At the top are Uruguay (who da thunk), the UK, Israel, and Argentina.  They pay 2X the worldwide average, or 3X what we pay.

If they can do it -- why can't we?