
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, October 1, 1993                   TAG: 9310010217
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

IT'S A GAS, THE NEWS BIZ

We here at the newspaper strive to be a vital part of your life by supplying you with the information you need - assuming you don't need to know what that Steve Roper crowd is up to these days - to prosper in this turbulent world our parents so thoroughly screwed up and handed us.

I am no exception.

But I forgot to remind you yesterday that you should put gas in your car before midnight - the midnight that just passed - because the price jumped up almost a nickel a gallon.

The federal government added 4.3 cents per gallon more in tax to gasoline at midnight. Sorry I forgot to tell you, but if it makes you feel any better I filled up my tank on the way home from work yesterday.

So I'm set. Sorry about you.

If you're really strapped, you can carry your empty milk container over to my house. I still have the twin 10,000-gallon tanks of leaded gasoline that I had filled the night before leaded gas went illegal.

I'll be damned if the feds are going to beat me at this gasoline game. One of the tanks in the backyard may be leaking, but only a quart or so a day.

As of midnight, for every gallon of gasoline we Virginians buy, we pay 36.1 cents in taxes. Your 12-gallon tank means $2.12 in Uncle Doug's piggy bank and $2.21 in Uncle Sam's piggy bank. Your Roanoke-to-Blacksburg round trip in your 20-mile-per-gallon clunker is $1.44 toward the government's next purchase of a space telescope that doesn't see or a rest area we don't need.

And the 4.3-cent-per gallon increase will earn about $5.5 million PER HOUR (my calculations) for the nation over the next five years, roughly the same you pay for an hour of an import-car mechanic's labor.

If you drive 15,000 miles, it'll cost you $270 in taxes at the pump.

If you had driven your car 15,000 miles yesterday, as I meant to remind you to, it would have cost you only $239 in taxes.

This is a significant portion of the new deficit-reduction plan, designed artfully to reduce our deficit while increasing yours.

We're being nickeled and dimed toward the financial abyss as we spew carbon monoxide to push ourselves to the environmental abyss.

But maybe we Roanokins shouldn't gripe too loudly. We may be further from the abyss than most.

We can still buy gasoline - or could before midnight - for 85.9 cents per gallon.

During a highly scientific Thursday afternoon study, in which I called friends in far-flung locations on the company's nickel under the guise of reporting, I determined that our local gas price is significantly affordable.

Here are my findings. Unleaded regular gasoline sells for $1.22 per gallon in Oakland, Calif. And $1.10 in Allentown, Pa. And $1.04 in Laredo, Texas. And $1.06 in Chevy Chase, Md. And $1.05 in Hartford, Conn.

We're on easy street in Virginia, where we refuse to impose stiff taxes on cigarettes or gasoline, but we do a pretty good job sticking it to the lowlifes who buy milk, eggs, bread and other evil stuff.

Did I forget to remind you that taxes on food, air and gravity were increasing, too? Ha! Just kidding. They're not. I'll remind you before they do.

by CNB