Politicians Suck at Math

Take 5 minutes to do some math on the gas tax holiday and find out how bad politicians suck at math.

Let’s do some math here:

$0.184 per gallon tax
$3.00 per gallon cost
35 mpg fuel economy
60 mph speed
3 months of driving 24/7

First, how many total miles is that? We’ll call it 90 days which is 2160 hours. At 60 per hour that’s 129600 miles. At 35 mpg that’s 3702.9 gallons; call it 3703. At $3/gallon that’s $11109. With the tax it would be $11790. Total savings if you were to use 3703 gallons of gas? $681 You can also get that by multiplying 3703 × $0.184 = $681.352 Let’s make it a whole year of nonstop driving. A leap year. 366 × 24 × 60 = 527040 miles. 527040 ÷ 35 = 15058 gallons. At $0.184 tax per gallon you save: $2770.67 And you’d still pay $45174. And to drive 527040 miles is over twice the difference from the earth to the moon (384403 km). Good luck driving even 100000 miles during the gas tax holiday. It really doesn’t take an economist. A pocket calculator would suffice.

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