Seen in the Courant:
The wholesale gas tax, also known as the gross receipts tax on petroleum products, is 6.72 percent and adds about 14.5 cents a gallon to the current average wholesale price of $2.15 a gallon for regular gasoline, the governor’s office said.
Rell wants the cap to go into effect when the wholesale price of gas hits $1.75 a gallon. That was the return rate state officials budgeted for when the General Assembly in 2005 anticipated using the gross receipts tax to help finance a 10-year, $1.3 billion transportation initiative. The initiative will provide money for new Metro-North rail cars, highway improvements and 25 new Connecticut Transit buses.
Higher-than-anticipated wholesale gas prices allowed the state to take in $120 million more in revenue in the last fiscal year than it expected, according to Gene Guilford, executive director of the Independent Connecticut Petroleum Association.
You know, you’d think that in a state where part of the transportation issues center on simply having too many cars on the roads, someone would point out that maintaining.even increasing.the tax creates an economic incentive for folks to reduce their car usage, while opening up funding opportunities to improve mass transit for commuters and/or to create offsets to alleviate the burden of the higher gas prices on the folks least able to absorb the effects.
I’m not a fan of any tax increase.but petrol taxes are less offensive to me than some other forms of taxation.