Gas Tax?
Update: My household figures might be off a bit. Will look at it later.
The latest story regarding the Democratic primaries concern the gas tax, an 18.4 cent tax placed on gasoline which helps fund work on highway infrastructure. In face of rising fuel prices, McCain proposed an elimination of this tax from Memorial Day to Labor Day (May 26 to September 1). Hillary Clinton quickly agreed, stating that oil companies would pay for it. Obama dismissed this, claiming it was political pandering and that eliminating the gas tax doesn’t help.
I saw the following two ads by Clinton and Obama:
Clinton says it would save $8 billion for families. Obama says it will ’save Hoosiers about 30 cents per day.” I was curious about where these numbers were coming from, so I took 20 minutes with Google and Excel to do a quick exploration. I found that the “30 cents per day” total for Hoosiers is certainly within a reasonable order of magnitude. Since Hillary’s “$8 billion” statement was vague, I don’t know how she is driving that number. If I take the estimated savings amount by Hoosiers and scale it up using the ratio of Indiana’s population to the US population, I get about $6 billion. But I’m not sure. You can see my math below and download the Excel sheet if you wish.
