It's the Math, Stupid! or How the Gas Tax Holiday Won't Help You

When I heard last week about McCain's proposed "Gas Tax Holiday," I knew it was a ploy to buy votes. At that time, I wasn't sure how much the federal gas tax was -- maybe 50 cents a gallon? When I found out that it was only 18.4 cents a gallon, I just laughed out loud.

This "holiday" is supposed to last just three months, from Memorial Day to Labor Day. So just do the math; I'll use my family as an example. When I fill up I usually add about 15 gallons to my car; my wife about 18. I fill up weekly, she fills up semi-weekly. For me, that's 15 tanks of gas (adding two extra tanks for additional summer driving); for her, 8.5 tanks. So...

Me: 15 tanks X 15 gallons = 225 gallons X $0.184 = $41.40 in savings
Lisa: 8.5 tanks X 18 gallons = 153 gallons X $0.184 = $28.15 in savings

That's $69.55 in savings for my family. This would be enough for us to buy groceries, or pay our electricity/water/sanitation bill, for 4-5 days. In my opinion, a good amount of savings would be about $200 for the summer. This would require a family with two cars to buy 1,087 gallons of gas over the summer. With an average gas mileage of, say, 25 miles a gallon, that would mean that a family of four would have to log 27,175 miles on the roads this summer. I don't know about you, but it takes me a year and a half to drive that much.

I brought this up with my father (a Fox News Republican who voted twice for Bill Clinton, by the way), and he said that $100 was a good amount of savings. But we've all been joking for weeks about how little the economic stimulus package passed by Congress will do for the economy. But $200 in savings? No voter's going to cast his vote for someone over a $200 savings, and if he is, then he's agreeing to be bought for $200. He would be even more stupid than I thought, and I think he's pretty stupid already. McCain (and now Hillary Clinton, who has jumped on his bandwagon) is engaging in nothing more than political games-playing. Sure, it sounds good, but it'll do nothing really to help anyone.