In the economics world, tax incidence is a matter of serious study. There has been a decent amount of work on who actually pays oil taxes. Hal Varian (who lat

In the economics world, tax incidence is a matter of serious study. There has been a decent amount of work on who actually pays oil taxes. Hal Varian (who later became Chief Economist at Google) wrote a good piece[1] summarizing the basics in 2000 for the New York Times. The summary: "A gasoline tax in a small country falls mostly on the residents of that country. The world price of oil is essentially independent of the taxing policies of most countries, since most countries consume only a small fraction of the amount of oil sold. "But the United States consumes a lot of oil -- almost a quarter of the world's production. That means it has considerable market power: its tax policies have a major impact on the world price of oil, and economic analysis suggests that in the long run, a significant part of a gasoline tax increase would end up being paid by the producers of oil, not the consumers." [1] http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/people/hal/NYTimes/2000-10-19.html http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/people/hal/NYTimes/2...