Visualizing the Actual Price of Gasoline: October 2012

Six months ago, we used Google’s Fusion Tables to create interactive heat maps to visualize the actual price of a gallon of gasoline across the United States. We’re updating that exercise today:

Average Price of a Gallon of Gasoline at the Pump

Our first chart visualizes the average price that consumers are paying per gallon of gasoline at the pump when they fill up their vehicle’s gas tanks, as of when we sampled it on 21 October 2012 as recorded by GasBuddy:

Average Combined Federal, State and Local Gasoline Taxes

Of course, the price people pay at the pump is jacked up by the combined total of federal, state and local gasoline excise taxes that are imposed by federal state and local governments. Our next chart shows how much gasoline prices are increased by these taxes on average by state, using data recorded by the American Petroleum Institute:

By contrast, oil companies make about 7 cents in profit for each gallon of gasoline they sell. The U.S. federal government by itself collects 18.4 cents for each gallon of gasoline sold in the United States – about two and a half times the take of what the people who actually work to produce and distribute gasoline across the nation earn.

Actual Price of a Gallon of Gasoline by State

By subtracting out these combined taxes, we can find the actual price of a gallon of gasoline in each state:

2012-10-23 17:03:18

Source: http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2012/10/visualizing-actual-price-of-gasoline.html