I ran a few errands earlier today and decided out of laziness and hunger to drive rather than bike. (When I got out and realized how effin beautiful the weather was, I promised myself I would go for a couple hours-long ride this evening.) I needed to fill up my gas tank, and damn! gas is back up to ~$3/gal ($2.979 where I stopped). When did that happen, I wondered. I looked at my most recent receipt, and it had been five days short of two months (and $0.32/gal) since I last bought gas. That must be a new record for me. I spent $27 for a tank full, also a new record. Eh, no worries—still less than the cost of a cup of coffee per day, right?

Anyway, I started thinking about the price of gas and gas tax rates and the don't-blame-us-blame-the-dadgum-guvment gas pump stickers that show the state and federal tax rates. So for the last couple of hours I've gotten my geek on and researched the history of gas prices and tax rates over the past few decades.

(Lots of numbers and graphs below...)

I collected data on unleaded regular gas prices and federal and Tennessee tax rates for 1976-2005. If you're interested, here's the ODS spreadsheet. Caveats, blah blah: I couldn't find historical Tennessee average gas prices, only national; the state tax rate used excludes the $0.014 combined "special petroleum tax and environmental assurance fee", for which I could not find historical data (or even WTF they're intended for).

Now on to the graphs. National average unleaded regular gas prices (nominal dollars, not adjusted for inflation):

Federal and state gas tax rates:

Percentage of price per gallon for federal and state gas taxes:

The tax per gallon on my purchase today was $0.398 ($0.214 state and $0.184 federal). At $2.979/gal, tax accounts for 13.4% of the total PPG. Individually, state tax accounts for 7.2% and federal tax 6.2% of PPG. These are the lowest levels for both in about 25 years, as neither tax rate has been raised in nearly 15 years!

So what am I getting at here? I don't know, I just thought someone somewhere might also find these numbers interesting. Given how little I need to drive, it's easy for me to say that I'm okay with rising gas prices, but I guess I should qualify that as being the result of higher gas taxes, not just increased Big Oil profits. (OT, why is it still 'big oil'? Is there such a thing as 'small oil' anymore?) I do believe that higher gas taxes could help provide a little bit of incentive to reduce unnecessary gas consumption, but that would only be one small part of the solution. We would of course need a government capable of handling the increased tax revenue wisely and not just spending it on new highway construction and expansion. Yeah, good luck on that one...

Sources:
State gas tax and its history.
Historical federal gas tax rates.
Historical national gas prices.