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Also my teacher told us today that gas prices are only leveling out like what the rest of the world pays and it will stay between 3 to 4 dollars a gallon
Interesting.
But there's a difference in why the U.S. is shelling out more per gallon right now, versus other parts of the world -- like Europe.
We've got a supply problem.
Discussions with my friends in/from European countries makes me think that a great deal of the retail price difference between the U.S. and our European counterparts can be attributed to taxes.
In 2002 the federal, state, and local taxes averaged $0.38 per gallon of gasoline.(**)
For the same time period, European taxes per gallon of gas averaged 20 times more than U.S. rates. The tax per gallon for 1Q2000 was $2.56 in Germany, $2.57 in France, and $3.29 in the United Kingdom. (**)
So, once this supply problem is sorted out, and world wide prices for oil even out a bit, Europeans will still pay significantly more than we do (unless there's some mechanism in European fuel taxes that scales them down as oil prices rise?)
(** reference: Hayley Chouinard and Jeffrey M. Perloff, "Incidence of Federal and State Gasoline Taxes," April 2004, http://are.berkeley.edu/~perloff/papers.htm)