OK, I guess nobody in Washington ran the numbers before rolling and then re-funding the Cash For Clunkers program. Disclaimer: This might make your head explode.
- A vehicle that gets 15 mpg and is driven 12,000 miles per year uses 800 gallons a year of gasoline. (12,000 / 15 = 800).
- A vehicle at 25 mpg and 12,000 miles per year uses 480 gallons a year. (12,000 / 25 = 480)
- So, the average clunker transaction will reduce US gasoline consumption by 320 gallons per year. (800 gallons used by 15 mpg car – 480 gallons used by 25 mpg car = 320 gallons saved per year, per car).
Are you with me so far? This is very basic math.
- The program claims 700,000 vehicles were traded in.
- 700,000 cars x 320 gallons saved per car = s 224 million gallons of gas saved per year.
That’s pretty impressive. Millions upon millions of gallons of gasoline saved.
- One barrel of crude oil = 42 US gallons.
- One barrel of crude oil produces 19.5 gallons of gasoline (source)
- Therefore, 224M gallons of gasoline saved = just under 11.5 million barrels of oil.
That’s cool. More than 11M barrels of oil (or 224M gallons of gas) were saved by the Cash For Clunkers program. Now consider the following:
- Americans consume 378M gallons of gas per day (source)
- That 224M gallons of gas / 11M barrels of oil saved is 59% of a single day’s worth of gasoline use in America.
- As I write this the price of oil is $72.26/gallon.
- Therefore, by saving 11M barrels of oil America saves about $795 million.
That is a big number. But wait… what’s that? Cash for clunkers cost American tax payers how much? Three billion dollars? Our government created, funded and ran a program that cost $3B to save $795M? In other words, 73.5% of that $3B was wasted by our government? And just think, this will take us about eight years to pay off. (here’s one attempt to put a positive spin on this crime)
Yet some people think that our government can somehow provide health care insurance coverage for all Americans while lowering costs and not increasing taxes?
Yes, because we should forget that this program stimulated the auto industry and resulted in the sale of many cars and thousands of workers being brought back to work to create more cars.
Creating jobs and bringing people back to work is a terrible thing to do!!
This program wasn’t created to save oil, the environment, or money. It was created to get people back to work and get the auto industry going again. And it did exactly that.
Think what you want…the program did not spur our economy or create jobs. Jobs were not saved, factory managers didn’t say “Hey! We are selling lots of cars, we better ramp up production.”
People sold cars they were going to sell already. Dealers did not keep sales people on the floor because of this program. It resulted in nothing other than wasting a massive amount of taxpayer money.
But you are a proud liberal and there’s no way to change your mind or confuse you with the facts of the situation.
And, you might want to look at the tax implications of the program, something that was TOTALLY misrepresented or avoided by the press: http://theloudtalker.com/2009/08/tax-for-clunkers/