As seen in this Dec. 31, 2014 photo, the average cost of gas in Cleveland, Ohio, has dipped below $2 per gallon for the first time in more than five years. AP Photo/Tony Dejak

A gas tax that fully corrected for the social impact of car reliance would upend life as we know it.

Amid all the celebration over America's plunging gas prices—down some 40 percent since June—it's easy to forget a very basic fact: in a global sense, U.S. fuel has been cheap for years. In late 2012, for instance, the United States ranked toward the bottom of a world list of gas prices, wedged between the likes of Tunisia and Chad on one side and Russia and Kazakhstan on the other. Most first-world countries paid at least double what America did then, just as they do today. The situation is hardly a happy coincidence for U.S. motorists. On the contrary, American fuel prices are kept down artificially by low gas taxes that fail to address the true social cost of driving. An international comparison of gas taxes shows the United States in back of the pack by a wide margin:

This national refusal to increase gas taxes—which have gone unchanged at the federal level since 1993—has two enormous impacts on everyday life. The first is that drivers no longer cover the cost of road and bridge maintenance, as the gas tax originally intended. UC Davis scholar Mark Delucchi recently estimated that drivers fall short in this respect by 20 to 70 cents per gallon. General taxpayers have made up the resulting budget gap in recent years, whether they drive or not.

That's not a horrible injustice, since most Americans still travel by car. The far bigger problem is that America's gas taxes are too low to offset what economists call the "externalities" of driving. Don't let the word spook you; all it means is that driving creates all sorts of negative social impacts that aren't being compensated for: personal time and work productivity lost to traffic congestion, lives lost to car crashes, and health risks created by air pollution, to name just a few. When Delucchi tallied up these costs, at least as they existed for 1991 driving patterns, he estimated them at upwards of $3.3 trillion a year (below, our highlight). As he told me recently by email, discussing the use of that figure in an infographic for The Atlantic, "clearly driving is way underpriced." Delucchi, Environmentally Conscious Transportation (2008) So what would gas taxes look like if they reflected the true social cost of driving? It's no easy question to answer, but for some sense of one we turn to economist Stefan Tscharaktschiew of the Dresden University of Technology, who recently tried to calculate the "optimal" fuel tax for Germany. His goal was to find a number that not only reflected all the social impacts of driving, but also one that accounted for changes in behavior that would result from more expensive gasoline. After crunching the numbers, Tscharaktschiew reached an optimal gas tax of .96 euros per liter—a figure that amounts to more than $4.36 a gallon in American money. Mind you, that doesn't include the actual market cost of gasoline. In other words, the optimal German gas tax, by itself, roughly doubles what average Americans are right now paying total at the pump.