[CottonBall]

As of yesterday, the stories released are that the $3 Billion IS exhausted! Most of those dealers are now deep in debt and having to carry a loan because customers drove new cars away and the dealers have not been paid by the Feds. Wonderful program to help out business.

I must be missing something here. $3B is already used up, but only 3% of dealers have been paid? Does this mean that the government now owes dealers a trillion dollars (3% of a trillion is $3 billion)?

[supercat]

I must be missing something here. $3B is already used up, but only 3% of dealers have been paid? Does this mean that the government now owes dealers a trillion dollars (3% of a trillion is $3 billion)?

If both facts are accurate, it means that the government has committed itself to paying $3B--minus expenses--worth of rebates, but has only gotten around to paying 3% of that, so it still owes the remaining 97% to dealers.

While I am reluctant to credit this administration with anything, the statement that the program is running out of money while it still has cash in the bank to pay its backlog of bills (in other words, the use of accrual-based accounting) is a departure from the normal Democrat use of cash-based accounting for such things. I don't doubt that the decision to use accrual-based accounting in this scenario is driven by politics more than honesty, but at least the program isn't giving $10B of promises.