Doing Math On The Gas Tax

The bridge closing may be a blessing in disguise… It shows the benefit if raising the gas tax 10 cents to pay for our projects….

This gas tax is nothing… We’ve been paying more for a gallon ever since the crash of 2009… We as customers will continue paying the same, and the oil companies and hedge funds will be the ones who can no longer get what they used to get out of a gallon…

In a study earlier this year, we showed all that the price of gas is not based upon supply, but on demand…  States with higher taxes, get their pre-tax gas cheaper than states with little or no tax…  yet they all come from the exact same refineries….

The Republicans who pretend to be against all taxes, are saying this is not affordable…

Here is what they are hiding from you….

Let us take the $20 million needed to repair the 495 bridge….   At ten cents a gallon, that $20 million will come from 200 million gallons….  At an average of 20 gallons per fill-up, that would amount to 10 million fill-ups in this state per year…. Excluding motorcycles and buses, there are an estimated 817,000 vehicles registered in Delaware….. The ten cents tax amounts to 12 extra fill-ups per year….  Of course, that is one a month… like you took an extra trip….

When this tax came out, we were told that 60% of gas sold in Delaware is to out of state vehicles… If that figure is true, then theoretically, you and I would only be accountable for 40% of that cost, which means we’d only fill up once extra for 4 months and have the rest normal…..  Is that really back breaking to us all?

Without the gas tax… it will have to come out of income tax…  If allotted evenly, that 20 million spread over every citizen, amounts to $20 for every man, woman, and child in the state…  (Considering the school population of the entire state k-12 is close to 130,000, then if you add the population from the years 0-4 for an additional 30,000, it would mean that the number of Delawarean paying taxes would be 870,000… )  That $20 million tax spread across all taxpayers evenly amounts to $23 per taxpayer…. per year….

So our choice is having the oil companies and hedge funds pay our tax for us, or to pay it directly out of our incomes….  You will pay the same for gas regardless.  Doesn’t it make sense to be getting something out of it for a change instead of having all our money simply go straight to their profit line?