Re: CHAT: the euro & 01.01.02

Quoting Roger Mills <romilly@...>:

> Padraic Brown wrote:
>
>
> >Am 21.12.01, Thomas R. Wier yscrifef:
> >
> >> And we still do.  The gas station around the corner from me sells
> >> regular unleaded gas for $0.989 per gallon.
> >
> >Correct. No one complains about paying $8.41 rather than $8.407
> >for a 8.5 gal fill. Just a minute! Where are you getting gas
> >for .989!? Lowest around here is in the $1.15 range.
>
> Tom Wier at last reports was in Chicago.
Back in Houston for the holidays, actually. After my last
post, I noticed that the price had gone down to $0.949
per gallon.

> A few years ago, when I drove to Florida every winter, it was
> interesting to observe gas prices along the way.  Mich,
> Indiana, about comparable; Kentucky, Tenn. a little lower;
> Georgia unbelievably cheap (on the order Mich. 1.20/.30,
> Georgia $l.00 or even less), Florida higher than Mich.
> The Miami-Palm Beach area was even higher. This is
> incomprehensible, reprehensible even.
A lot of this has to do with how the state manages its finances.
Every state can decide what kinds of taxes it wants to impose
to pay for the level of social services it chooses to have.  Texas
and a lot of Southern states have relatively low level of social
services vis-a-vis the North and West Coast, which means of course
that the minimum level of taxation doesn't need to be as high as
it would be otherwise. Some states choose not to have an income
tax; others choose to have an income tax, but lower gasoline
taxes; others low income and gas taxes, but high property taxes
and estate taxes.  Some states, no doubt, don't have any gasoline
tax at all, and the federal gas tax is the only one to figure
into the price at the pump.

=====================================================================
Thomas Wier <trwier@...> <http://home.uchicago.edu/~trwier>

             "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n /
Dept. of Linguistics  mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..."
University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought /
1010 E. 59th Street   and not complete one road that has no turn"
Chicago, IL 60637     Empedocles, _On Nature_, on speculative thinkers