What a Costly Mistake This Was

I recently chanced upon an interesting assessment of the Obama’s Cash for Clunkers program and the individual got me wondering about the numbers involved in the final figures for the program. He explained it as follows.

A vehicle which provides 15 mpg and is driven for 12,000 miles in one year will consume about 800 gallons of fuel annually. Now if a new vehicle were to get 25 mpg and is driven for the same 12,000 miles yearly it would use 480 gallons of gasoline per year. Therefore, with these figures the average clunker transaction should reduce our gasoline consumption by a total of 320 gallons yearly.

According to statistics there are now 700,000 vehicles that have been sold under this program. That amounts to a total of 224 million gallons of fuel saved per year. In barrels this would amount to a little over 5 million barrels of crude oil. Five million barrels of crude oil is approximately a forth of America’s daily consumption.  At the current rate five million barrels of crude would cost us approximately $350 million dollars assuming a price of $75 per barrel.

The strange part of all these figures is that we as tax paying American’s have just spent $3 billion dollars in our efforts to save a mere $350 million.

That $350 million dollars is the actual cost that these same people would have spent at the gas pump when filling up their car. Out of that $350 million you would find that much of it would be going back into the revenue accounts of both the states and the federal government as gasoline tax. My point here is does this make any sort of sense what so ever.  Where did we as tax payer’s benefit from this tax dollar spending?

This friend is just the tip of the iceberg. If no one bothered to calculate these figures before initiating the program then what can we expect from Obama’s health care reforms? We must contact every senator we have to get them to oppose any health care program initiated by Mr. Obama. We as a nation simply can afford his expensive spending.