Neal Kaye writes | Californians already pay the nation’s second highest gas tax at 68 cents a gallon — and now it will go up again in January to pay for a first-in-the-nation climate change law.
“I didn’t know that,” said Los Angeles motorist Tyler Rich. “It’s ridiculous.”
“I think it’s terrible,” added Lupe Sanchez, pumping $4.09-a-gallon gas at a Chevron near Santa Monica. “The economy, the way it is right now with jobs and everything, it’s just crazy.”
When gas prices go up, motorists typically blame oil companies, Arab sheiks and Wall Street speculators. This time they can blame Sacramento and former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for passing a bill requiring California to reduce carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/08/27/california-hidden-gas-tax/
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Some notes: gasoline in California will be subject to California’s Global Warming Solutions Act tax (Schwarzenegger signed AB 32 into law in 2006) which will boost the price starting at $0.12 per gallon and could go as high as $0.76.
Right now, Hawaii has the nation’s highest gas prices, California is second. This new tax would make California the state with the highest priced gasoline and diesel fuel.
My old turbo diesel Mercedes runs beautifully on cooking oil – rapeseed is favourite – that can be obtained for 75p – 99p per litre, as opposed to pump diesel at £1.36 – £1.40.
Sometimes if there’s a BOGOF on locally, it can be had at around 50p per liter.
In Canada many folks with diesel cars and trucks run them using home heating oil. It’s just diesel fuel without the road tax added after all. Some rural gas stations illegally sell home heating oil at the pumps. Sweet.
In British Columbia, heating oil is priced the same as motor fuel for that reason.
Oil heating has been eliminated.
In Washington State the same is happening as in B. C., Heating oil costs $1200 for 300 gals. 150 gal minimum. 5gals of kerosene is $44.00 at Lowe’s.
Higher gasoline taxes -> less people. Easy way to solve the water crisis!!!
Note: No water crisis in San Francisco [Pelosi’s home district]. She exempted her region from water use restrictions.
We thought that California would fall into the sea; instead it is being depopulated and turned back into a desert.
You guys aren’t working it right. In the UK you get 20% added to that tax as an extra tax: ‘Value Added’ Tax on tax!
Screw that taxpayer like you mean it!
I’ve never thought about it in these terms before, but it occurs to me that I’d rather live in Cairo freakin Egypt than California in this day and age.
That’s pretty sad.
Nowadays in Cairo you could likely get away with wearing a sidearm and keeping a full-auto AK in the house, to protect your family, without begging and subtly buying with influence hoplophobic bureaucrats for permission. Rent is probably cheaper too. If the high speed internet access is good, sounds like a great idea.
Just keep the RPG’s in a closet on a high shelf, those are for special occasions.
Harold Fine now drives a Tesla S, the Rodriguez family always knew how to optimize vehicular economics, so what’s the problem?
tesla S costs about $80,000. tesla gets a gov credit of about $30,000 per car sold. Without those tax subsidies from the middle class, those well-off buyers of a Tesla would be paying almost $110,000 for that overpriced sedan. welfare for the uber rich green liberal. No one has a Tesla as their only car either. It is just rich kid toy to show off to friends and neighbors.
Groovy.
There are some places that don’t rape you too bad on fuel costs. I live in Penang, Malaysia. I’m previously from Seattle about 12 years ago which is very car-unfriendly. Over here we pay 0.64USD per liter so that works out to 2.45US per gallon.
But import cars face a tax of 100%-200% over the cost of the car when imported. So a Lexus RX350 runs about 107,000USD to purchase.
The annual road tax on a 3L car costs 675USD per year.
One way or another they get you.
But the speeding fine for 100mph (160kph) is about 90USD.
I have no sympathy. This is precisely what Californians have been wishing for, now they are getting it. I love it!
Yes.
The 2010 election season is ramping up! In California, those who envision a more sustainable future are paying attention! Proposition 23 is on the ballet with the goal of suspending California’s ground-breaking Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32).
Not only did they wish it, they confirmed it when they didn’t vote down its repeal.
In other news, the IRS / Administration doesn’t want it reported how many people want to leave / relocate out of these type of conditions.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/08/28/Obama-s-IRS-Delaying-Release-of-Stats-of-People-Moving-from-High-Tax-States
“Neal Kaye writes | Californians already pay the nation’s second highest gas tax at 68 cents a gallon —”
Luxury! We in the UK dream of only paying 68 cents per US gallon. As previous posters have already highlighted, we pay much, much more than that.
That’s just the tax. But you’re right, most other places in the world pay more than the US does.
Interestingly, we motorists in the UK also pay a ‘greeny inspired climate tax’ to prevent the world from boiling up to unprecedented levels. This taxation is in addition to petrol duty. It’s called annual ‘vehicle excise duty’ (VED or road tax), and is based solely on the volume of CO2 spewing from a car’s exhaust pipe.
Ironically, my 1998 2.5L V6 (potential classic) pays £238.00 pa – which is £47 less than the £285.00 VED than my wife’s 2006 1.6L 4 cylinder pays. This is because the current scale of VED charges (based on CO2 emissions) only applies to vehicles manufactured after March 2001.
All this CO2 nonsense doesn’t, of course, take into account driving style, recent age of the car or the annual mileage of a vehicle. So, a 2014 registered 1000 cc Fiat that is thrashed to the limit and does 50,000 miles in a year pays less VED than a 2002 registered 4.5L V8 Range Rover that is driven sedately and covers 7,000 miles in a year. The taxation law is fickle.
What ever happened to democracy? What we have is an elected dictatorship being controlled by an unelected dictatorship.
In a Democracy the people drive themselves to the polls, vote, and then take orders. In a Dictatorship, the people don’t have to worry about the inconvenience of driving to the polls to vote, saving gas.
California’s Liberal Democratic lawmakers have already began their damage-control campaigns. A letter addressed to to CARB’s chair-heathen, Mary Nichols signed by at least 16 assembly members across the state, desperately pleas for a “reconsideration” of The cap-and-trade program that they originally supported. Of course the passing of the buck onto the RINO former Governorator should be an easy sell to their uneducated, low-income, and mostly immigrant constituencies. Continuing the perpetual corruption, it seems Governor Moonbeam is up to his own shenanigans as well.
“The letter highlighted something not well known: ‘AB32 does not mandate that CARB create a program that generates revenue for the state and it was not intended to be a funding mechanism for massive, new state efforts at GHG [Greenhouse Gas] reduction.’
Yet in the new state budget for fiscal year 2014-15, which began on July 1, Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature grabbed $250 million of cap-and-trade funds for the controversial high-speed rail program. That’s 25 percent of an expected $1 billion in cap-and-trade revenues.”
Everybody loves irony, but nobody likes to pay for it.
Washington State is on the verge of implementing a very simliar tax. I guess Inslee has been inspired.
This pretty well destroys the Myth of second hand smoke:
http://vitals.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/28/16741714-lungs-from-pack-a-day-smokers-safe-for-transplant-study-finds?lite
Lungs from pack-a-day smokers safe for transplant, study finds.
By JoNel Aleccia, Staff Writer, NBC News.
Using lung transplants from heavy smokers may sound like a cruel joke, but a new study finds that organs taken from people who puffed a pack a day for more than 20 years are likely safe.
What’s more, the analysis of lung transplant data from the U.S. between 2005 and 2011 confirms what transplant experts say they already know: For some patients on a crowded organ waiting list, lungs from smokers are better than none.
“I think people are grateful just to have a shot at getting lungs,” said Dr. Sharven Taghavi, a cardiovascular surgical resident at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia, who led the new study………………………
Ive done the math here and this is how it works out with second ahnd smoke and people inhaling it!
The 16 cities study conducted by the U.S. DEPT OF ENERGY and later by Oakridge National laboratories discovered:
Cigarette smoke, bartenders annual exposure to smoke rises, at most, to the equivalent of 6 cigarettes/year.
146,000 CIGARETTES SMOKED IN 20 YEARS AT 1 PACK A DAY.
A bartender would have to work in second hand smoke for 2433 years to get an equivalent dose.
Then the average non-smoker in a ventilated restaurant for an hour would have to go back and forth each day for 119,000 years to get an equivalent 20 years of smoking a pack a day! Pretty well impossible ehh!
What does this have to do with this post?
You should have put this on tips & notes, rather than threaded comments on an unrelated story.
This is a tax hike, nothing more. More specifically a use-tax hike, the more you use the more you pay the government. They can dress it up as “Global Warming feel good we are saving the world”, but the bottom line is it just more taxation, this will have zero effect on the climate.
This is the house we built.
They need to start posting a tax breakdown on gas pumps. The public would find it very educational.
For anyone interested, here is the list of combined state and federal gasoline and diesel tax assessments by state. Hawaii and California (as stated elsewhere here) are the highest, and Alaska and New Jersey (New Jersey?) are the lowest. California’s neighbor, Arizona, comes in at the low end of the list and 37.4 cents per gallon.
http://www.ask.com/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_States.
Tucson AZ: unleaded regular 87 octane was about $3.22/gal Thursday. driving up to the north rim of the Grand Canyon this 3day weekend about 900 miles RT. my hybrid gets 37 mpg so my fun will cost roughly $80 in gas. beautiful scenary for hiking and trail running, priceless
Note that Diesel fuel is taxed more than gasoline, thus discouraging the purchase of higher efficiency vehicles.
The total tax on diesel is 1 cent more per gallon than gas in California.
The National average is about 6 cents per gallon higher for diesel
http://www.api.org/oil-and-natural-gas-overview/industry-economics/~/media/Files/Statistics/StateMotorFuel-OnePagers-July2014.pdf
The 20- 30 cent higher cost for diesel is probably due to the ultra low sulfur mandate from the EPA which required significant investment in the refining side of the business which many smaller refineries could not afford. The other factor may be competition at least where I live since very few stations offer diesel.
I looked at a diesel car but could not justify the extra cost especially with the much higher fuel cost.
Hawaii is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and has no refineries. All the fuel has to get there on tankers. So, I can understand why Hawaii’s fuel prices are high.
But California? What’s up?
Just wondering…
special blend requirements during winter that only CA based refineries make. also limits competition from out of state suppliers.
Hawaii has 2 refineries.
Yes, but two refineries can’t offset the progressive politics similar to the tax and spend policies in California. To be fair, California is one of the major oil producing states while I suspect Hawaii must import all crude via sea.
Since I only know what I read, I suggest a read of this newly arrived book:
http://cleanenergypundit.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/tyger-growl-knowing-of-burt-rutansince.html
Best currently available reality check IMHO
Love to see the liberal heartbeat of the USA (California) beat their voters over the head with the policies that they pushed to get elected. Unfortunately the innocent voters who tried to keep them out of office get beat also.
I have been purchasing gas in the SE USA for several weeks @ur momisugly just over $3.00 / gal. Yesterday it was less than $3.00 many places.
The government of Venezuela got carried away with gas tax increases a few years ago. Gas stations started igniting. The tax disappeared.
Reblogged this on Public Secrets and commented:
This state has gone mad. We’re doing everything to drive prosperity away in pursuit of “progressive” fantasies.
About 25 years ago when I occasionally bought gas for close to $1.00 a gallon (once for $ 0.87 when traveling through Kansas) I was in favor of increasing the federal tax on gasoline in order to pay for repair of our crumbling infrastructure of bridges, tunnels, and levees. Fast forward. Gasoline now costs $3.00 to $4.00 a gallon, the tax was not increased, most of the repair was not done, and now the California tax increase will pay for what!?
Wow, so glad to live in the boondocks of central Alberta. Just heard Premier Christy Clark of British Columbia bragging about her carbon tax (hello Mr. Eiger). Good for her. Regular fuel is C$1.50 per litre in Vancouver, C$1.35 to C$1.40 per litre in most of the interior although there are a few stations in Price George have a little gas war where the price is C$1.25. If you live near the US border, you can slip across the line and buy for C$1.08 per litre.
In Alberta, the price ranges from C$1.10 to C$1.16 at the moment, though it will likely jump by 10 cents a litre this long weekend at most places. A lot cheaper to run a tractor out here.
Around here, many stations do post the amount of tax on the pumps if people care to look. Not that we can do anything about it. Death and taxes.
Obviously, being a California import, I was completely against AB-32, as well as the suite of laws passed since to bolster and expand its premises (SB-375, SB-535, SB-1136, AB-26, AB-278, AB-904, AB-1532 etc.).
However in 2010, Californian’s were given a chance to stall AB-32 under Proposition 23. They smacked it down. Now I am completely opposed to doing anything at all to roll any of this madness back even a smidgen. While I am still in California, I will join any group and actively proselytize to not only prevent any changes to this madness but exhort politicians to do even more, as much as possible.
Why? Because the stupid should hurt.
I won’t be here much longer though. In fact, my car should be sold within the week (an SRT8). I will take my RAM 2500 and my off-road teardrop trailer and run the backtrails of the west I know so well for as long as I can hold out or until I can find a job in another state.
Californian’s are like granola. What aren’t fruits and nuts are flakes.
This is one of the many reasons that I have just moved to Texas.
I left California for Texas 21 years ago. Best move ever.
Proposition 23 ” paid for by Texas oil companies”,the tv ads claimed.
After the election the SF Chronical did a story that the anti 23 ads were actually paid for by Morgan Stanley.
Ironic because 60 Minutes called them the “worlds largest oil company”