Word Problem
Via Vodkapundit, actual rocket scientist Ed Lambert does the numbers on Cash for Clunkers. It’s a gas:
A vehicle at 15 mpg and 12,000 miles per year uses 800 gallons a year of gasoline.
A vehicle at 25 mpg and 12,000 miles per year uses 480 gallons a year.
So, the average “Cash for Clunkers” transaction will reduce US gasoline consumption by 320 gallons per year.
They claim 700,000 vehicles – so that’s 224 million gallons/year.
That equates to a bit over 5 million barrels of oil. 5 million barrels of oil is about ¼ of one day’s US consumption. And, 5 million barrels of oil costs about $350 million dollars at $70/bbl.
We all contributed to spending $3 billion to save $350 million. How good a deal was that ???
They’ll probably do a better job with health care though.
Whip out the handy calculator … tap tap tap … looks like all those cars need to be driven for nearly 9 years to hit the break-even point. Not counting the interest on $3 billion. Help me out. What’s that make it? I’ll take a wild guess and bump it up to 12 years, though 15 might be more realistic. Sorry, bad choice of words.
How good a deal was that? New math: It was great deal for auto dealers, salesmen and certain car buyers. Not including my boss who pointed out that he got penalized for driving a fuel-efficient Honda CRV for 200,000 miles while someone else was enjoying a fine gas-guzzler that would eventually be subsidized by his tax dollars.
OK. Next word problem. If the president is headed for 2012 and Congress is headed for 2010, and they can’t pass a health-care reform bill but they’ve already driven up the deficit by $1.3 trillion, which one is going off the rails faster? Show your work. Remember to refuse to add any numbers in Afghanistan.
Math makes my head hurt. OK, moving on to English. Here’s Bikini Girls reading Star Wars. Thanks, Vodkapundit.
Topics: everything
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:00 pm on Tuesday, September 15, 2009
2 Responses to “Word Problem”
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September 16th, 2009 at 9:15 am
Well, my Congressman is a rocket scientist too and that hasn’t worked out too well for us in NJ. While I’m not disagreeing with Mr. Lambert’s premise my hope is that he checks his numbers on space flights a little closer than he did on this.
A barrel of oil is 42 gallons, true, but that’s gallons of crude, not gasoline. From what 30 seconds of googling informed me is that from a 42 gallon barrel of oil one gets the following products after refining:
10.31 gals of diesel
1.38 gals of heavy distillates (like home heating oil)
4.07 gals jet fuel (not to be confused with strong coffee)
7.01 gals of various products (lubricants, etc)
1.68 gals heavy fuel oil
1.72 gals liquefied petroleum gases (LPG)
18.56 gals of gasoline
(Now if you do math like I do math, you’ll notice that this adds up to nearly 45 gallons; evidently the refining processes change the density (and increase the volume) of some of these products)
So these 224 million gallons of gas in fact are the equivalent of a little over 12 million barrels of oil, not 5, which means we “may” save a whopping $840 million dollars by spending $3 billion. Again, it still is insane but if we’re going to be racist by opposing these policies we might as well do it with somewhat more accurate numbers.
September 16th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
[...] Doing Some Math On Cash For Clunkers September 16, 2009 Posted by taoist in Democrats. Tags: Cash for Clunkers, Government, Idiocy, Lunacy, Math, Obama trackback Yup, that seems like government work to me. [...]