Gas prices are yet again in the headlines for all the bad purposes. The national average cost for unleaded gasoline is now around $4.33 per gallon, as per the American Automobile Federation. In some regions, the average price of a gallon is as expensive as $5.74.
The average price of gasoline in California, particularly in Santa Barbara County, was $5.80 per gallon on Friday. These results reflect a 51% rise over the previous year’s same period. The influence of the war in Ukraine has been blamed for some of this. Government spending and energy policies in the United States, on the other hand, have undoubtedly been a key cause.
The Respond Of Several Policy Makers
Some congress members have responded by proposing a new tax to increase the cost of gasoline even more. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Representative Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) have filed measures that would levy a high “windfall” tax on American oil corporations. The idea would impose a tax on oil firms’ profits over $66 per barrel. Those gains would be taxed at a mind-bogglingly high percentage of 50%.
That tax revenue can be used to fund a second stimulus check worth $240 for individual taxpayers and $360 for filing jointly. However, this approach is a mistake for various reasons, and it represents a significant misunderstanding of growing gas costs among many Dc policymakers, reports Newspress.
Dismissals
The first is a dismissal of the effects of government strategy on rising prices. The federal united states government has spent quite a lot of money in the last five years in the previous eight years. Following Russia’s incursion of Ukraine, the US implemented tough sanctions that disrupted global supplies.
Rep. Khanna and Sen. Whitehouse’s attribution of price increases to “corporate greed” ignores the impact of their own decisions and completely misses the issue. This school of thought assumes that the comparatively cheap pricing for a barrel of oil was due to corporate philanthropy on the side of the same corporations that are now being chastised for being selfish.
