Posted on 08/02/2009 4:36:24 AM PDT by Kaslin
Imagine the government making an estimable promise of enormous proportion. Imagine the government pledging a promise so big that it would, in fact, as they would argue, actually save an entire sector of the economy. Imagine in doing so, that the same government promises blind fairness, trust, and integrity in the process. Imagine the government assuming the significant portion of funding such a program off of the hard sweat labor you and I commit to everyday. Imagine this program pledging complete utopia in helping to restore a struggling economy, even if the sector it was addressing was a largely insignificant part of the economy.
And imagine if, after promising this program would last for a long period of time, it ran out of actual cash in about 1/16th of the time they pledged it would work.
Now imagine if that program dealt with something as serious and intricate to the daily lives of Americans as the provision of our health care.
Oh, but not to worry, health care is still a ways off. No, we're talking about a program that uses our tax dollars to purchase cars that can not be resold, and that no one will drive, but instead be taken directly to the nearest junk yard and crushed.
That's how your government spent 1 Billion dollars in roughly six days.
They did so on a long list of promises...
No doubt some very clever chap, maybe Robert Gibbs or that smarty smart David Axelrod, came up with the ever effusive "Cash for Clunkers" brand. (Man if only their college marketing profs could see them now!)
No worries though, because while they promised there would be enough of our tax dollars--that we slaved at our jobs for, to feed our families with--to cause the program to last until November, maybe even through the end of the year, they blew it in not even one full week's time.
They called it an "economic stimulus" designed to boost the purchasing of American made, more fuel efficient vehicles. Of course they had to do this because instead of letting a company do what every other company has to do when it makes vehicles, products, or widgets that nobody wants--fold--they instead felt compelled to compel you to "buy" a vehicle that nobody was buying, and to then use our tax dollars to buy your lemon. Or as that Gibbs or maybe Axelrod fellow put it: your clunker.
So you and I bought 240,000 clunkers in six days, of which roughly 80% have already been eliminated from circulation at our local junk heaps.
Don't you feel great about it?
And did this 10% unemployed tax-paying society get a good deal on the cars they bought? Most likely, resoundingly NO! Because, instead of buying something that they had saved for, the vast majority of these "purchases" were actually extended indebtedness agreements between the buyer and the dealer. The dealer who is having to literally sell his soul to President Obama just to stay in business.
To top it off, Chuck Schumer in the Senate, and several Democrats in the House--like Barney Frank, Maxine Waters, and others who think monopoly money is real--have commanded the gerbil-operated printing press in the basement of the White House to print up $2 billion more dollars so that you and I can hopefully buy somewhere in the vicinity of 750,000 lemons... uh I mean clunkers.
$3 billion dollars that belongs to "We The People," randomly and--if you ask the dealerships--quite selectively doled out for three quarters of a million dollars worth of junked cars.
Your current administration has promised that this little effort would save the auto industry. They've promised it will save the environment.
But what about saving my children's dinner?
Did you know that if you just flushed $1,000,000 a day down the toilet from the day that Jesus Christ was born until this, you would've barely spent more than $7 billion dollars?
The Obama administration, because it monkeyed around, or would it be better to say, "czarred" it's way into essentially half of that now in say, another two weeks or so.
And while the fearless leader of the "beer summit" will spout, "let me be clear" and issue another strong assurance that this same group of people can make "certain" that the "promise" of the American health care system will only "improve" in the days to come if we just trust them, many of us are wondering: "how do we know you will do any better by us than making us pay for junk, when through the fruits of our own labor we already have access to the finest health care around?"
Mr Gibbs, Mr. Axelrod, Mighty Beer Summit leader? Any of you wanna take a stab at that one?
I’m thinking that it might be a kind-of back-door ‘bailout’ of lending institutions - using this program to reinflate their balance sheets.....
Thanks for taking out tax money.
out=our sigh.
Sorry to break it to you AUH20, the ENTIRE program is a giant fraud. You are sucking up capital the rest of us have saved to put to use in other areas. Instead, that capital was robbed from us by the government to provide incentives to other people to go further into debt AND destroying a perfectly good asset at the same time. And if the government isn't taxing us to produce this money, then it is further enslaving our progeny with additional mountains of debt and higher inflation.
The government would have been better off having people dig ditches and fill them in again. At least that wouldn't destroy good assets. But that wouldn't have paid off the UAW and the ditch diggers union isn't a particularly strong voting bloc.
Our government is criminally insane.
At $1,000,0000 a day, the 3 trillion porkulus bill takes us back the very beginnings of humanity — 8,000 years ago: 6 THOUSAND years BC.
Multiply this by thousands and the Government is really sticking it to lower income citizens by denying them reliable, inexpensive transportation.
“Even worse, the most valuable parts of the purchased vehicles, their engines and transmissions, are destroyed, eliminating an economical source of spare parts for other vehicles. This is the first time I’ve seen deliberate vandalism and wanton destruction of valuable resources that are particularly useful to low income people enshrined as national policy.”
Just think what these numb nutz are doing to used car prices out two or three years from now...taking almost a million used vehicles out service is bound to increase the prices of said vehicles out a few years from now. Who is that going to effect?
I was thinking the same thing - the whole program makes no sense, which requires thinking like a manipulator, conniver, scammer, oh forget it...obombabot!
I notice that nobody can refute my assertion that a lot of the “examples” of how this program is a nightmare are just total lies or exaggerations. Trading in a car with 24 mpg on another with this program? Lie. Trading in “practically brand new” cars on this program? Lie. Dealers not getting paid? The program has only been in effect for ONE WEEK. Will some not get paid? Maybe,but probably not if they follow the rules? But complaining because they haven’t been paid one week into the program? Get real. They still are accepting the clunkers, also, so they can’t be TOO worried. They will follow what their corporate headquarters tell them to do if they don’t listen to stupid rumors. I did have problem with one dealer - they actually asked me to give THEM a check for $4500 until they got paid from the government, then they would give me my check back. Yeah, sure, I’ll give you that- they said “well, we won’t cash it”. They had no answer when I said OK, I won’t sign it. This dealer actually called me the next day and said I could come in and not have to write a check, it was satisfying to tell them I bought at a dealer in the next town. As to some people saying I used their tax money to buy my car, well that’s right. If you drive on an interstate highway you use MY tax money, if you rely on our military to provide protection for our country you use MY tax money, etc. etc. I’m glad my car qualified for the program, I wish I could use it again for one of my other cars.
Any dealer saying it can only be used for financed cars is lying, they are just trying to get extra profit for their financing department. Just go to another dealer.
Get your free government money !!!
I'm screaming at the tv every time I see it, so much that hubby is thinking of committing me.
Free money for all!!! It will be the best stimulus. Think of the Boost the economy will get. We won.t even have to work. Robbery would be eliminated. Why would anybody need to steal.
Could someone clarify this:
Local news has been saying that if you go to the dealer to negotiate the purchase of a new car, using the clunker deal, the dealer was TAKING your old car before the paperwork was approved. Nobama’s plan REQUIRED the dealer to destroy the engine in your old car with “Clunker Bonb”, which appears to be some sort of acid poured into the oil filler opening.
All of that was being done BEFORE your paperwork was approved!!!
If above is true, a family with one car would be out their car if the dealer snatched it and they were NOT approved for whatever reason. If approval takes days or more- what does this family drive in the meantime? They cannot have a car they cannot afford without the trade in cash.
Has the local news got it wrong??? Please clarify.
“and then take the still working, still running, still decent trade ins and put glass in their engines and run them till they are ruined .............what absolute numbskulls.............””
That bothers me, also.
There are perfectly good cars out there that students need for school. They cannot afford new nor do they qualify, without a job or work history.
The auto dismantlers are getting a raw deal, also, because they cannot use the parts for repairs for someone who didn’t turn in their old car.
If I need parts for an 88 Buick, and the dealer was just required to destroy the engine, this is nuts. The 88 Buick I was driving just lunched an engine. I am not allowed to put in a more efficient engine, because then I have “tampered” with the car and the DMV won’t register it nest time around. I have to replace like for like. Thousand of engines gone to waste over this mess from Washington.
What do they know about keeping a car tunning with parts sometimes bought from the auto recycler?
The government has screamed RECYCLE at us for years, and now almost a million engines will be junk. (That is using all $3 billion in the clunker program.) They sure aren’t good at following their own words, are they?
I can’t believe that the greenie/recycle party is promoting the destruction of perfectly good vehicles.”
I can—destrucion is their middle name. Especially destruction of ANYTHING that a hard-working middle class American owned.
Make sure your Liberal neighbors see the picture and then ask them is this is what they thought they were voting for when they wanted NObama?
Not in my case, got approved, got my new car and gave them my old car - took about 2 hours, including financing for new car. I HEARD that the dealers were supposed to disable the engine before sending to re-cycler but that this was changed so that the re-cycler has to do it but I’m not sure on that. I DO know, through a friend who owns a junkyard and is participating with several dealers, that he can strip the car of everything but the engine and drive train before crushing it. He said most of the trade-ins have very high mileage on them and nobody would want to put an engine with 100k+ in their car anyway.
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