The British have gas pains

The serious and weighty issues of global finance have been, mercifully, punctuated by a real-life British farce in the land of steak and kidney pie. Your intrepid columnist is never one to let Britain get too far out of line without comment, and today will be no exception.

At issue is the pending meltdown in the entire transportation sector, as angry truck drivers have caused chaotic gridlock wherever possible. Okay, they don’t call them trucks there. The word is “lorries”…jeez, can’t those people speak English?

If you think we’re a bit miffed at gas prices here, you should talk to those guys over there. Gas (“petrol,” they say…I guess they really can’t speak English) is reported to cost $4.13 a gallon, with 75 percent of that cost being comprised of that oh-so-veddy-British thing: taxes. The people there have done an oh-so-tres-Francais thing about it: raised Hell.

At this juncture I have to ruin your day (a Friday, no less) and let you know that a British gallon is not the same as an American gallon. If I could roust the analysts in my Weights and Measures department I’d figure out if that $4.13 quote is for our gallon or theirs, but, this being Friday and all, the vast array of technicians and staff in my sweeping empire have all sequestered themselves in Club Jama for a conference of some sort.

Anyway, a British “Imperial” gallon is about 1.2 U.S. gallons. Either way, $4.13 for a gallon of go-juice is a lot of coin.

Saying that 75 percent of that price is comprised of taxes is not the same as saying that the taxes are at a 75 percent rate, though. (Read that sentence twice. I had to.) I derive a figure of– drum roll please–a 400 percent tax rate. Four hundred percent–yikes!

This is, for any students of finance out there, the crux of the difference between “mark up” and “margin,” by the way.

For the rest of us normal folk, my calculation runs like so. If 75 percent of the fuel cost is taxes, then 25 percent of it isn’t. Twenty-five percent of $4.13 is $1.03. Therefore, the question is how high must the tax rate be to increase the fuel price from $1.03 to $4.13? Answer: 400 percent.

Don’t ask me why the media haven’t reported it that way. The way it is. A 400 percent tax rate. But, heck, that’s why my Pulitzer is on the way, or, at the very least, I can maybe bum a cup of coffee off John Del Rosario at Tribune headquarters.

In the meantime, maybe you can take the sting out of our lofty pump prices by realizing you’re paying about half of what the British are paying. It’s not much of a consolation, but I guess it’s something.