Prices at the Pump: Why Americans Have It Good
There's little U.S. residents enjoy more than complaining about gas prices, but paying $3.55 a gallon -- the current average price at the pump, according to GasBuddy.com -- is chump change compared to the prices consumers in other countries pay.
The average U.S. resident actually pays 90 cents to $2 less than the actual market value of gasoline because of government subsidies.
In Turkey, where the government finds the fuel tax relatively easy to enforce compared to other taxes, gasoline costs $9.98 at the pump. About 40 percent of the country's workforce have under-the-table jobs and don't pay taxes, which is why the fuel tax is an important source of revenue that Turkey can't easily afford to alter.
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Norway is a major oil producing country, but the average Norwegian has to shell out $9.97 for a gallon of gas, more than twice the U.S. average. Norway doesn't subsidize fuel at the pump; instead, it uses oil profits to fund free college education and infrastructure development.
Most Europeans pay a much higher price for gasoline than Americans do, anywhere between $6 and $10 more a gallon.
In oil producing countries in the Middle East like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, gas is dirt cheap. Saudi Arabians pay only 45 cents a gallon at the pump, while those in Kuwait pay just 80 cents.
But nowhere in the world is gas quite as cheap as it is in Venezuela. At 4 cents a gallon, it's practically free. In Venezuela, it costs about $1.56 to fill up the 39-gallon tank of a Chevrolet Suburban, according to calculations from Bloomberg, compared to $137.28 in the U.S. and $389.22 in Turkey.
For example, in India, gas costs about $4.36 a gallon, which may seem comparable to U.S. gas prices but really isn't. This is because per capita income is much lower in India than in the U.S. -- the cost of a single gallon of gas in India is about 16 percent more than the average Indian worker earns in one day; in the U.S., the average price of a gallon of gas is less than half of the federal minimum wage for one hour of work.
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