I stumbled upon this "conversation" tonight. It looks like a transcript, but if so, I'm not sure where it was televised.

The title of the story says, "The media steals our chances of a fair election," and the general message of all four participants seems to be, "We're smart but the media is stupid". I'm a reader who starts out with the opinion that the media is stupid, so you'd think I'd be an easy sell on their message, but it sure doesn't help their case that their own conversation is itself chock-full of dopiness.

The crowning stupidity is this one:

Um, sure. ... If gas costs $90 a gallon and your car's gas mileage is 3 mpg.

I'm not expecting them to crunch the numbers, but one ought to at least have some vague sense of how much one spends on gas and how far $600 goes. If you don't, you're functionally innumerate, which is just as bad as being functionally illiterate. Not only that, this is posted on a website which serves as a forum for 15 elite, wealthy women. They might want to try a little harder to refute the stereotypes that women are stupid about math and rich people have no clue about what things really cost.

Let's take a closer look at the numbers. This report from Cambridge Energy Research Associates says that cars in use in America average 22.2 miles per gallon. That seems about right.

The linked press release doesn't mention a figure for how many miles each car is driven, and several news stories based on that release have the same omission. (The actual report costs $295 and is not online.) But here is a summary of an EPA study which assumes that each vehicle is driven an average of 12,000 miles per year, which also sounds about right.

To drive 12,000 miles at 22.2 mpg requires 540.5 gallons of gas. Your $600 stimulus check therefore makes up for a $1.11 increase in the price of gas for a full year.

Sounds to me like Bush is right on this one.

11:28:56 PM  [permalink]  comment []