Reply #40: In the UK, those things don't all come as the result [View All]

of taxes on petrol. They're funded from income taxes (40% of my household's earnings go to income tax, and another roughly 10% to things like National Insurance). We pay 17.5% sales tax too (VAT, or "value added tax") on most purchases on top of our income tax.

Our National Health Service is not free - it's funded by the taxpayers. I'm fine with that. It still beats what the US has.

Unfortunately, public transportation has been largely privatised in the last several years, so we're having to pay through the nose for that nowadays, while having to accept piss-poor service a lot of the time. Tax on petrol has nothing to do with funding rail travel. The railways are run on a for-profit basis with the takings going to the owners.

Obviously I don't know how other European countries run their services (how much is nationalised vs. privatised), but I believe that UK pump prices could probably stand to come down. The petrol tax here certainly doesn't by itself fund the services you mentioned, and there's no way the oil companies aren't filling their pockets from the prices we pay to fill our tanks.

Edited to say: You've made me curious about the actual breakdown of UK petrol prices, so I did a little search and found a BBC link (quite an old one from 2000) that gives a handy little pie chart: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/newsid_921000/921304.stm

Interesting stuff. I didn't know that fully half of what we pay in UK pump prices goes to import duties. Where it goes after that is anybody's guess, but I know we as a nation have to fund the Royal Family's opulent lifestyle.