Part of the responsibility for this lies with the increase in the price of crude oil over the same period. This time last year crude was trading at just under $ 64 a barrel, but today its price is close to $ 95. There is, however, another party besides the oil producers that is making a ton of money at your expense: your government. Some countries tax fuel so heavily that almost half of the price you pay for the pump actually goes to pay for the fuel itself. And in the UK, fuel is taxed twice, attracting fuel tax and then having 20 percent VAT (value added tax, a type of sales tax) above the combined price of fuel and fuel duty, which means that the government actually makes more money than the British when the price of crude goes up. But other countries do not impose taxes at all. Do you know which country drivers have it easy and which ones win a raw deal? The chart below from the US Department of Energy Alternative Fuel Data Center is a few years ago, but while the price of gas and diesel paid by drivers has changed since then, it is unlikely that the amount of tax applied by each country will has changed dramatically. or at least not enough to prevent us from gaining a useful idea of the extremely different fuel taxation strategies used around the world. The DoE table is full of interesting information, the most obvious of which is the huge tax gap applied between the most driver-friendly nations (Indonesia, Brazil, USA and Canada) and almost every other country in the world. While UK drivers give their government $ 3.49 every time they pour a (US, not imperial) gallon of juice into their tanks, their Indonesian counterparts are charged just $ 0.06 in tax and US drivers get away with it. to pay $ 0.10. (The original graph is interactive, btw, I do not have any kind of superpower to measure measurements that helped me extract these numbers, in case you are wondering. I added it below, although it may be difficult to see and use it mobile Appliances.) This UK figure may need to be revised to take into account the recent 5% ($ 0.04) drop in fuel charges imposed by the Chancellor as an aid to Britons who are terrified of huge increases in road fuel costs. and domestic gas and oil. Although they still harden for $ 8 per gallon on the pump, it ‘s like removing a floating bottle of Evian from the Pacific and waiting for everyone to applaud you for clearing the world’s oceans. Another interesting thing to note from the graph is how different some countries treat gasoline and diesel. While the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Indonesia apply almost the same tax on one fuel as the other, most countries tax diesel at a much lower rate. In Greece, for example, gasoline is taxed at $ 2.93 per gallon, but diesel is only taxed at $ 1.40. And in Chile, the government applies only a $ 0.39 levy on diesel, but a $ 1.57 levy on gasoline. QOTD: How high should gas prices be before you think of something more economical? The curious men in this case are Iceland, Mexico and the USA, where diesel is hit with higher taxes than gasoline. A missing statistic set is Russia, whose name appeared on the raw graph but had no data available to display. What is the biggest measure of all this? If you really hate taxing your fuel, move to Brazil and buy a diesel car.
