Driving Less

I just cannot shake this gas price thing.  I took the data from NationMaster and converted a few of the notable countries to cost per gallon at the pump:

Some people say that we have so much money in America that even if we doubled the gas price, consumption would not change.  I think we should give that a try.  We currently use 378 million gallons of gasoline per day so a $3.00 per gallon gas tax (in addition to current taxes) would raise $137 Billion in tax revenue each year.  Sure, maybe our consumption would go down -- which would also be good  -- so let's call it $100 Billion.

That would not quite pay for the interest on the national debt ($164B), but it would pay for the State Department ($51B) and HUD ($47B).  See the Wikipedia page on the 2010 budget here.