Rep Marty Seifert (R-Marshall) says the DFL is getting ready to raise the gas tax 10 cents a gallon, or 50 percent. Mathematically speaking, that's correct. But is it true?
The last gas tax increase to its current 20 cents was in 1988, when unleaded gas sold for about $1.00 per gallon. Thus, about 20% of the price at the pump was tax.
Today, unleaded sold for $2.30 down the street. A 20-cent tax represents only about 8.7 percent of the price. Let's also figure that the purchasing power of that tax has declined to about 67 percent. So we're paying the equivalent of about 5.8 percent of the price per gallon today.
Add a dime and we're just about even in 1988 dollars to what the 20-cent per gallon tax was worth. We'd still be only paying about 12.5 percent, as a percentage of the price of gasoline, compared to 20 percent nearly two decades ago.
50 percent increase? Only sorta.
