Suspend "Cash for Clunkers"?

I think cash for clunkers is doing a good job of kick starting the faltering auto business so far but it is too early to tell if this will lead to other consquences

 

It's Katrina moron.
Hurricane Katrina!

Ever thought of yourself as a glitch? You sure do present yourself as one, day-in, and day-out on ET.

 

Yea sorry but the major glitch is on you. The dealer, not the customer, applies for the rebate. They sell the 15k car for 10.5k (a loss) and then get reimbursed by the feds. You think the dealer is stupid? They aren’t going to sell a car at a major loss if there’s a chance they won’t get the rebate.

The opposition to this program around here is that people are so shocked that a government stimulus plan was so incredibly successful that people want to shut it down. Look at what just a billion did. Imagine if we used the 25+ they gave to Citi to do something better than pay their bonus checks.

 

Obama's czar to create green jobs has spent 60 billion of our tax/stimulus funds as of 8/1/09, and how many green jobs have been created??? "Zero"!!!!!!!! Obama's green czar was recently questioned as to why not one green job has been created yet? His response was their still trying to define what a green job is.
"I'm not kidding".

 

Did Obama do any research on the risk of this program going over budget? Did he intend to have a limit on it or does it go on forever.
The dealers are having the headache with this. Imagine what Doctors would go through in a healthcare program.

Just like Obama saying the stimulus would keep unemployment under 8% again it looks like his clunkers program was done with no analysis.
Healthcare by nature always costs more tomorrow then today.

Obama is reckless!!

 

First off, he’s wrong about it taking 2-3 months to pass the legislation. Looks like it is only taking a few days. But I’m trying to figure out how he comes up with the 22,000 figure. What is the point of that? It’s simple, it costs $3500 or $4500. How in the world will it cost $45,354. Sounds like typical talk from people who make excuses as to why we don’t have any money to help Americans but always seem to have some to go to war.

 

The author is saying the one billion dollars given to the auto industry will help it sell 22,000 more cars then normal. This comes out to be $45,354 of Goverment public outlay per car.
I believe he is saying that it is a lot of money to move one car above normal monthly sales.
He says it is likely this will hurt new sales in the up coming months.

 

Yes, Subprime did happen under Bush's watch but in all fairness that was more democrats in congress IMHO than it was Bush's fault. I would go as far to say that it was due to legislation from the democrats as they wanted to push more people into home ownership with government help.

Greenspan DID actually testify to congress warning them about the problems we could face in what many thought was a housing bubble.

It was under the leadership of Rep. Frank and others like him that pushed Fannie and Freddie to keep pumping money into housing. Here is a couple of quick examples (there are MANY more on youtube) that illustrates my point.

BTW, It appears pretty obvious that your pretty far to the left and thats fine if you want to be. I am not a republican and in fact I can find plenty of problems with both parties. I think whats more important than being "left" or "right" of the isle is that your "correct" in your statements. Blaming Bush(who I am not a fan of) is simply wrong IMHO on this one and Democrats should own up to this one just as the republicans need to own up to the problems in Iraq.

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Wow you really need to spend a little less time listening to Sean Hannity. Do you really think that banks were pressured into giving people 100% LTV mortgages without employment, income, or asset verification? Think about what you said. Can you provide any proof whatsoever that banks were pressured into giving 400k loans to people making $8 an hour? Just because Fox News tells you something, doesn’t mean it’s true. Let’s just face it, banks got greedy. Free market capitalism went way overboard on this one. The Fed created the boom so it could bail out all their buddies during the bust.

You baby boomers are so funny. You just can’t figure out why people can’t do things the way you did. Well, the world isn’t the same as when you bought your house 30 years ago.

 

Does anyone give any thought to what this does to our economy???

Look, I understand some in DC would say don’t worry about taking away all the cheap affordable cars off the market for people who may not be able to afford a more expensive car. After all we will give the poor people money and handouts and they will be fine.

I for one am not fine with this and not only is it a total waste of money but its filled with unintended consequences like distorting the used car market. How many jobs (think mechanics, used car lots, auto parts shops and salvage yards) will be LOST as a result of this giveaway. A a very minimum lost wages and lower income for people that service used cars will happen. While no numbers yet exist and maybe hard to calculate I have to wonder what the net result is for AMERICAN jobs/income. After all some of the cars being bought are foreign made cars and most of the jobs/income being lost are American jobs.

As I understand it many of the new ‘purchases’ would have happened anyway with our without the government handout(Duh).

Whats gonna be the next great idea? How about we start burning down houses that were built before 1975 with less than 10 inches of insulation if you buy a new energy star house. That would give firefighters plenty to practice on (first controlling the burning and then putting the fires out in a controlled method) as well as take a lot of houses out of the marketplace that dont have as high of conservation levels.

You could give the new home buyer a $25K credit and that would make buying a new home more afforable. That would put a lot of people to work building new homes and get rid of a lot of excess homes on the market.

You just need to ignore the facts that it would raise the deficit (wont it be great to tell the children how their future was mortgaged away so we could destroy cars and homes) and lower the total assets that America owns but lets not get facts in the way of change.

The real scarry thing as I write this is wondering how many people will read the home burning concept and actually think it might be a solution to the housing problem......

DC should rename itself to UC (Unintended Consequences)

Want to see what they are doing with the cars to make sure no one drives a “Clunker” again. take a look at the youtube video. If your a taxpayer and this doesn't make you mad than I don’t think your paying attention.

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