Yah, sitting at £1.129 here in England at the moment. Considering a gallon is around 4.5L over here you are looking at a £5.10 gallon, or $7.80 approx. It's expensive, but like has been said we have services that have to be funded somehow. If only they actually did it properly.
Car tax, fuel tax, VAT (which is paid on top of the fuel tax, so when fuel goes up, so does the amount of tax you pay), national insurance, income tax, council tax, import duty, not to mention a lot of stealth tax like the £15 surcharge they added onto criminal fines recently.
A lot of the tax involved in bringing stuff in from the US to here is always related to how pissed off the governments of the two countries are about each other. My father buys American cars and imports them into the country, he bought a 69' Buick Riviera and about 3 days before he imported it there was an argument over something stupid like bananas and a trade embargo was put in place that took all special priviledges away. Stuff like cars made before 1972 not being elligible for import tax, and only being subject to 5% VAT. As it was he paid 17.5% VAT and 10% import duty. To add insult to injury, the VAT is added at the end of the calculation, so to the total cost of the car including car purchase price, shipping fees, finders fees, even the import duty is subject to VAT. It's a bit of a pisstake.
Yes sir they tax the crap out of yal over there. By the time you figure everything out on a yearly basis Brits end up paying more than 50% of everything they make to the Royal Government. AND yes that is where we are headed if Obama has his way.
They may not want to call it socialized society, but that is exactly what it will turn out to be. We are already paying out about 25% to 30% in taxes now, so if they pass the new medical bill that will add another 20% to 25% to what we are already paying out. So think about that America??? That will mean if you make $16 and hour on the job that $8 of every hour goes directly into the Gov's systems and programs. So even though your pay looks good on paper, what you are actually working for is half of your hourly wages. So if you take good care of yourself and hardly use the medical system at all, which saves you tons of money now. Well that will all come to an end very soon, because you will be paying for everyone elses medical problems and/or frauds and scams.