This is exemplar of why this thread needs to be purged; it's all hand-waving with no sign of genuine understanding. A back-of-the-envelope calculation, that everyone here should be able to do and would lead one to the conclusion that it's better to just not post, is omitted. This took around 10 minutes:
According to the US Energy Information Agency, the US petroleum consumption is
19,148,000 barrels/day (
1).
We'll define your nebulous term that means nothing, "fractional change," as the actual, rigorous term that everyone who graduated highschool understands to be the standard deviation, of monthly petroleum costs for 2010 and 2011 separately. IL Hub (
2) was easy to find and will map to movements* in other basin/hubs, as well as futures.
2010 IL Hub costs:
Mean cost/barrel: $71.28
Standard Dev: $4.69
2011 IL Hub costs:
Mean cost/barrel: $90.33
Standard Dev: $6.94
That yields a mean supply induced shock to the economy of approximately 7% of the cost of crude, or $6 bucks/barrel as per the two year period.
19,148,000 barrels * $6 = $114.9 million/day, or $3.45 Billion/month.
This is the increased cost the average fluctuation in petroleum took out of household budgets. It is a virtual tax on users.
You then proceed to compare this to the FAA shut down -- a one-off event -- which nets
$28.6 million/day in taxes (
3). Hmm... even to a first approximation you should have come to the realization the article you posted was ideological bullshit (as if the url didn't predispose that).
Furthermore, and vastly more importantly, there are widespread downstream effects of the non-linear costs of petroleum though the economy and it's productivity that are missed in a straight numerical comparison. This is what happens when enormous amounts of the economy are dependent on refined products that have various pricing lag times (eg.
crack spread). There is a higher relative 'multiplier' effect on petroleum prices through the economy. Your comparison is utterly ridiculous at any deeper level of study.
At some level, your post is representative of why our schools are failing us. You are patently unable to think, to actually utilize knowledge and compute what's not hand fed to you -- in this case by thinkprogress. All of us, as we approach the types of problems we expect the 21st century to hold, should be able to have a basic conceptual framework by which to objective measure if something is valid. Fermi was brilliant at these back-of-the-napkin calculations. And you have no excuse here, the basic calculations are simplistic to an extreme. How can you approach complex issues like the national debt, international relations, investing, molecular biotechnology, or hell, even know if the dosage of insulin you need to give your mother is in the ballpark of being correct if you can't solve the above? It's shameful.
Unfortunately, your post is also indicative of why poligaf is a cesspool and waste of effort. Lets be honest, it's not a place for actual debate. It's overwhelmingly populated by leftists, moderated by leftists, and is used not as a place whereby a point-of-view can be examined, but one in which a non-leftist opinion is attacked 10-15 times in quick repetition while leftists are free to post utter crap because the cost-benefit of actually replying is ridiculous. It's a support-group for like minded kids to feel that their positions are valid and worthy.
To borrow from Feymann,
poligaf is to the real world as masturbation is to sex. It might feel good, but you're still just touching yourself.
* EDIT: For clarity, the movement is what's important, not the absolute price as we assume zero-sum at this level.
