Gas expensive? Fuggettaboutit!
For all you readers of The Warren who are complaining about the price of gas being around $3.00 per gallon, here's what I paid for a tank of gas las Wednesday here in Italy. The price of unleaded gas was 1.32 Euro per liter. I put 40 liters in my car for about 53 Euro. Since everything is in European/metric unit, I will now change these values mathemagically to numbers that people in the US can understand. The Euro/dollar exchange rate on Wednesday, 26 April was 1.23934 which means one liter of gas cost me about $1.64. So, I bought 40 liters of unleaded for $65.69. This wouldn't suck all that bad except there are 3.78 liters per gallon so 40 liters is actually equal to 10.58 gallons. So, my bottom line on Wednesday was that I spent $65.69 dollars for 10.58 liters of gas or $6.21 cents per gallon.
So, all you price of gas whiners in the US, come over here to Eurolandia and then you will really see what expensive gas is.
posted by The Great El-ahrairah @ 01:25
2 comments
2 Comments:
I don't know about Italy. But many countries use gas as a major tax revenue. Some countries on the other hand provide thier citizens with extremely low gas rates as a way to boost gnp. In the US though, we are taxed up the @$$ and on top of that have to pay a small percentage of tax on our gas for road use. I seems probabale then that Italy's higher than normal gas rates are a direct result of having a lower tax rate. Overall, putting more money in your pocket. Plus, how long does it take you to drive accross Itally? Thought so. What is unacceptable in the US is that in six years our gas rate have almost tripled, whereas revenue has stayed relatively the same. People like me on the other hand are more upset that we have the technology and the resources to almost completely eliminate our reliance on oil, let alone middle eastern oil. But the technology has largely been witheld, and no company has been allowed to persue such ventures.
Italy is the same, they use gas taxes as a major revenue generator, just like the rest of Europe. Our gas taxes in comparaison are much less (check out the latest Wizbang post about this).
Actually, driving across Italy is not all that much of a problem, but the major traffic flows are north to south, and driving from Sicily to Rome takes you about six to seven hours. Here in Sicily, my compute is about 90 kilometers one way, so, I'm doing a Southern California compute everyday with over $6.00 a gallon gas. So, like I said, don't whine to me about expensive gas.
Post a Comment
<< Home