gas taxes
 

this pic is kind of hard to see but I was pumping gas and saw this (seen it many times before) but thought to snap a quick pic of it.

the quality sucks because it was from my phone. notice, in NC we pay over 30 cent a gallon for the gas tax (road tax, whatever)

looking back at it, it's a really sucky picture. at least I tried.

Increasing the Federal tax on gas would be a great way to slow down our economy even more than it already is.

France is much closer to socialism than the US and I for one do not want to get closer to socialism. I prefer we do not try to imitate that country's government, especially when it comes to tax law.

Kevin

Cool map. That explains why I never buy gas in North Carolina. I usually buy gas on the north side of Richmond VA, Florence SC, and Brunswick, GA when going to Florida. (You don't show it, but Florida's fuel tax is pretty steep too.) On my next trip I think I may keep a 1 gallon can of gas in the back of the truck and see if I can hypermile enough mileage out of the beast to make it from Richmond to Brunswick without stopping for fuel.

-Jay

not really sure why they put these little maps on the gas pumps. usually just ticks me off. that one was a little dated, I think it was good in 2006 but little has changed since then as far as the amounts I think.

I wish the quality was better but I was pumping gas the other day and thought it would be cool to post. didn't want to start a thread about just that and since I had talked about it here already I figured why not.

I think our usage has already fallen off. I just read an article from msn.com's homepage that said Americans have been curbing their usage. People are traveling less and the new more efficient cars being bought all over are helping.

Also, I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think we owe the middle east nearly as much as the far east.

I can't see that the population of new efficient cars being bought all over are actually helping. First, auto sales are in a slump, second the non brand new existing cars substantially out number new sales, and my old crummy Sentra still got better mileage than most of the new efficient cars being sold.

Where will gas prices go from here? I don't think there is a good way to know. Oil futures are down along with the dollar going up a bit. Good combination.

While FE car sales may not matter, I bet FE cars (including those old ones) are getting utilized for far more of the miles driven.

True to form and past price cycles "it" has taken a drop in recent weeks as it has in past years even though the refineries shut down for the storm in Texas. Does anyone think that mortages were not paid because more of peoples income was spent on gas and people ran out to pay for their homes?

I believe that uneducated people were told by real estate agents and mortgage brokers that they could afford these homes and were given sub prime loans that they should have never qualified for. A couple of years later when the interest rate and the payment jacked up they all of a sudden find that they could no longer afford it. Even if fuel prices did not rise we still would have the mortgage crisis. Higher fuel prices and a weak dollar just made it worse on the economy. With the flood of forclosure properties on the market the real estate market crashed. At that point anyone who had purchased a home within the past 5 or 6 years probably owed more on their homes than they were worth. And don't get me started on the federal program that encouraged these mortgage companies to make these people homeowners that really could not afford it.



-Jay

Sorry, but I have to get you started a little. The problem is not in the federal programs themselves, but rather in brokers flat out lying about income to the banks, and misleading borrowers at closing. Very few of the actual banks carrying the paper on these loans wrote the loans directly. Instead, they purchased them on the open market under the guise of it being good paper. But they either didn't know just how much the brokers (totally independent sales people) were fudging things, or they saw opportunity to profit off of a game of hot potato.

So blaming the federal government for this crisis is simply falacious. The government never mandated that ANY mortgage lender make bad loans. The brokers simply discovered that they could cheat the system and did so very handily. The banks on the other hand ran their mortgage purchasing business very irresponsibly by not conducting their own due dilligence to determine the real value of the mortgages they were being sold. In essence, they were gambling with stockholder funds on the word of people with no financial interest in long term solvency of the notes.

Deregulation is what got us here, not lending to minorities.