
Taxes make up about one-fourth of the gasoline price! Many of the citizens of Illinois are paying much more than that. Illinois consumers pay from about 58 cents to 80 cents per gallon in taxes, depending on where they live. You are paying at least 58 cents for every gallon of gas you pump, in taxes! That is alarming.
Let me break that down per gallon: Federal taxes - 18.4 cents, Illinois motor fuel tax - about 19 cents, underground storage tank tax - .3 cents, environmental impact tax - 1.1 cents, state sales tax - 5% or about 18 cents and local sales tax 2% or about 7 cents. The sales taxes paid are on the current price of the gasoline, so if the price goes up, so do your taxes, automatically! If the current price of gas is $3.50, then you are paying about 63 cents in taxes with every gallon. If the gas is $4.00, then you are paying about 67 cents per gallon! That is why taxes are spread out to make them seem that they are not too much. Could you imagine letting everyone know you are paying 60 - 80 cents in tax with every gallon you pump? Or if you put 10 gallons in your tank at $6 - $8 in taxes? More people would be upset. Did you know that a law was passed stating that a gas station cannot give a pre-tax price or show how much is actually the tax? The government does not want you to know how much you're being taxed.
Now for the numbers. Are you ready? In the U.S., there are about 140 billion gallons of gasoline consumed every year. That translates into over $25 billion dollars in federal taxes alone. In Illinois, about 6 billion gallons of gas are consumed each year. That is about $3,000,000,000 a year or roughly $8,000,000 in gasoline taxes collected every day! How is Illinois broke?! Bad management!