{Rant}
I guess I’m behind the curve because today is the first time I’ve seen this (I’ll get to it in a minute), and of course being the obsessed, angry person that I am, I’m absolutely indignantly inflamed by it.
The “CARS” (Car Allowance Rebate System) or “Cash for Clunkers” program was touted by the government as the green savior both for the auto related industry from a monetary perspective, and the “earth” from the environmental perspective. We were going to get all these clunkers and jalopies off the road that are spewing tons and tons of nasty, gene-mutating, monster-creating pollution into the air. In addition, we were going to save Kajillions and Kajillions (not a real word, I made it up… in case you couldn’t tell) of gallons of gasoline by getting shiny, brand new, sparkly, angel-like, fuel efficient cars on the road. It’ll be harmony between man, nature, and machine, just like the touchy feely Prius commercial says… *gag*
The glorious leaders in Congress were going to graciously grant up to $4500 to each person who brought in a clunker to trade up to a vehicle that had 10 mpg over the mpg rating of the clunker brought in for trade. Pretty sweet gig if you can get it, right? Well… save your enthusiasm for a few minutes and keep reading…
No one expected it to be as ridiculously popular as it was. To hear its proponents talk after it started, it was the greatest thing since, or BEFORE sliced bread. It had a tremendous take rate and within a week, they had run out of funding and our infinitely wise and supreme, fiscally responsible overlords in Congress decided we needed to dump more piles of crisp, newly printed money (thanks, Ben Bernanke!) into the program. Within 29 days or so, we burned through the allotted amount and they shut down the ‘wildly successful’ program… and patted themselves on the back smugly, enjoying the elitist satisfaction of showing everyone how smart and wise they are for generating such a great, honorable, sound, green-ish program that actually ‘worked’. Yay them! Woohoo! … or not …
Problem is… it only LOOKS successful on the surface. The more you investigate and dig into it (something the illustrious Congress is not known for doing very well unless they’re looking to railroad someone), the more you see it was a trainwreck and a complete and total waste of money… we’re talking PORK here… big time. This was a secondary auto industry bailout… (for the Japanese and Koreans, but that’s a whole other article…)
First of all, before I get into the math of why this didn’t work, let me briefly (just briefly) talk about the fact that the rebates for these vehicles were to be handed out by the government as REIMBURSEMENTS to the dealers, who FRONTED customers the cash on the vehicles they purchased. Get that? It’s out of pocket from the dealers. You add that to incentives, etc., on each vehicle and you can see that this is a tremendous amount of cash they’re laying out. Cash they’re strapped for already. As you can imagine since this is the government we’re talking about, the rebate checks to the dealers do not happen instantaneously. They have to wait for them… and some of them are being denied due to failure to meet the CARS criteria (even though they actually MEET the criteria – typical government crap). Of the rebates that have been applied for, about 1/3 so far have actually gotten the rebates. The Transportation Secretary relays that they hope to have the rest processed and handed out by September 30th, but if I were a dealer, I would not be holding my breath in anticipation. How often has a government projected deadline come and gone with no action? Never, right? Yeah… thought so.
Now… to the numbers… this is what made blood shoot out of my eyeballs…
“A vehicle that gets 15 mpg and does 12,000 miles per year uses 800
gallons a year of gasoline. (They call this a Clunker…even though it runs perfectly)
A vehicle that gets 25 mpg and does 12,000 miles per year uses 480
gallons a year. (A New Car)
So, the average clunker transaction will reduce US gasoline consumption
by 320 gallons per year.
They claim 700,000 vehicles were part of this program, so that’s 224
million gallons/year. (or 700,000 whole good cars lost)
That equates to a bit over 5 million barrels of oil.
5 million barrels of oil is about ¼ of one day’s US consumption.
And, 5 million barrels of oil costs about $350 million dollars at $75/bbl.
So, we all contributed, through our taxes, to spending over $3 billion to
save $350 million.”
Nice, right? Is that not your typical government operation? We saved less than 0.2 percent per year of our gasoline usage! Not 2%… ZERO POINT 2%… Two tenths of one percent…
{sarcasm} WOOHOO! Shout it from the friggin’ mountain tops and write songs about it and sing it to your kids as bedtime nursery rhymes, because that, my friends, is a friggin’ deal and a half! I can hardly contain myself! {/sarcasm}
If these idiots can’t get this minor program right, what the hell makes you think they’re going to get Insurance Reform (the progressive catch phrase it’s being called today…) right, much less a “public option”, when we’ve wasted so much on this and then “social security”, Medicaid, Medicare, Amtrak and even the friggin’ POST OFFICE are absolutely broke and bankrupt!?
Oh… and don’t even get me started on the “green” side of this… there is none, but if I went into details about that here, my head might just spontaneously combust or something… so I’ll spare you that. You can look it up for yourself…
Wake up America! Fire ‘em all! Put ‘em all out of a job!
{/Rant} …for now…
