Showing posts with label Cash for Clunkers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cash for Clunkers. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

-Cash for Clunkers: The debacle continues. Even Rep. Joe Sestak isn't happy.


Even liberal socialized healthcare pusher Rep. Joe Sestak realizes Cash for Clunkers is a stupid bureaucratic nightmare, and that is exactly what it has become.

The federal government has only reimbursed auto dealers for 2 percent of the claims they've submitted through the popular "cash for clunkers" program, a Pennsylvania congressman said, calling on the Obama administration to help speed up the process.

Rep. Joe Sestak, D-Pa., called for "immediate action" to address the problem in a statement Sunday, after writing a letter to President Obama Saturday expressing his concerns.

In the letter, Sestak said only 2 percent of claims have been paid and that four of every five applications have been "rejected for minor oversight."

In recent days, auto dealers across the country have been complaining that the reimbursement payments are slow to process. And they said some of their applications were being rejected because of apparent procedural issues. The statistics Sestak cited suggest those complaints are not based on isolated incidents.

Wait wait wait... did I read that correctly? 2% of the claims have been paid out? Hurray for government efficiency! Let them handle healthcare! Aw hell let them give all of us auto insurance and houses too! After all, it isn't fair that only the rich get those fancy things. We are a much evolved and enlightened society and EVERYONE should have them right? Wait for it friends.

Saturday, August 1, 2009

-Cash for Clunkers: Another stupid liberal idea that does more harm than good

Here's the problem with the Cash for Clunkers program that has been talked about so much on the news. It's another stupid leftist program simple as that. It's all just getting ridiculous.

The Cash for Clunkers program is stupid for a lot of reasons. Not only is it just another tax-payer bailout of the unions automakers, who can sell more cars at artificially depressed prices so they can keep the doors open. It also screws with the free-market (big surprise there) by pulling forward demand that isn’t there now, only to kill demand over the next 1-2 years. Killing off the clunkers also hurts the used car market, the spare parts market, and the auto repair business. If there aren’t any old cars to buy or fix, those guys are all out of a job.

But one of the most asinine parts of the plan is that they take old cars, many of which were being used as functional day-to-day transportation the day before, and destroy them. A perfectly good and useful machine destroyed for political reasons…

In a normal world, you take your trade-in to the dealer, he buys it from you, and then he resells it at the auto auction. It is the most efficient allocation of resources for the product. In this case, the government buys your trade-in and, instead of using it for its full value, it destroys the vehicle.

I know people will say that some of these cars were maintenance disasters to own and if the blue book is less that what someone will pay you for it, then there is no point in keeping it. But the Cash for Clunkers program requires that a working vehicle be destroyed. What about giving it to charity, or to your teenager, or to whomever deems the thing more useful than a $4,500 credit on a new car.