Slashdot Mirror
"Cash For Clunkers" Program Runs Out of Gas
Ponca City, We love you writes "The Washington Post reports that Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has called members of Congress to inform them that the 'cash for clunkers' program will be suspended because the program has run out of money, and congressmen say they intend to ask the Obama administration to divert some funding from the existing economic stimulus package to maintain a scheme that they see as genuinely stimulative. 'Clearly, this has been a very stimulative program that's got consumers back into the car market. It's our hope that possibly more funds can be made available,' says Cody Lusk, president of the American International Automobile Dealers Association." If there is more funding, though, a report on CNET says it may come out of money to have been set aside for renewable energy loans by the US government.
Is anybody going to buy a new car just because of this handout? Seems like it's juust giving a bonus to anybody who was going to buy one anyway.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"The $1 billion program was set up by the U.S. government in June. The idea was to entice consumers to trade in their gas-guzzling cars for more fuel-efficient models, both to boost auto sales and improve the nation's fuel efficiency."
Bicycle, bicycle, why don't you ride a bicycle?
Cars are like, heavy, man.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Cheers
I work for many car dealerships and know there's an IT admin somewhere in the fed govt that's having a really bad month.
The backend sites (fueleconomy.gov and esc.gov) are damn near useless - they mandate dealers scan in all the paperwork and upload as pdf, but it's basically been one big DDoS - all the dealers in the country trying to submit the deals right here at the end of the month. Been this way for days.
When you give people their own money back, they spend it.
Who'da thunk it?
Why, I think they could learn from this and practice some more evidence based policy by giving everyone their own money back, and then they could stimulate more than just Government Motors.
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
Perhaps this is just an anecdote, but the few people I know that took advantage of this program bought a Honda or Toyota as they have pretty good gas mileage comparatively. I do find it comical that this is being floated as a stimulus plan when it seems to be going to foreign car companies. But I suppose as long as more people end up driving efficient cars, this is a worthy goal. I'm just unsure if it is do-it-right-in-the-middle-of-a-recession worthy.
I'm still not in favor of this "stimulus". Not only is it for a group of people that have older cars. But it rewards those who were too irresponsible to buy "fuel efficient" cars to begin with. Honestly, 5 years ago you could have gone out and bought a Hummer, and now you can trade it in, and get a discount on your next purchase.
Then what I don't understand is that all of the car that are traded in, go straight to the car crusher. What about all of the families that are in need of a decent affordable car, but cannot afford to buy a brand new one? Why not give a tax credit to everyone who buys/owns a new vehicle that meets a certain MPG?
It just seems like this bill rewards those who are rich and were environmentally irresponsible over the last 10 years.
They estimated that $1 billion would be enough. They figured that would last for six months time.
It barely lasted 2 weeks.
This is why central economic planning doesn't work, and why shortages ran rampant throughout the Soviet Union and eastern communist countries. Simply put - Government politicians are no good at running an economy. They don't have the necessary skills.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Don't the traded-in cars just get sold as used cars? So this program put not only the newer, efficient cars on the road but also leaves the older inefficient ones rolling around. Your tax dollars at work benefitting people who bought big SUVs a few years ago who want to trade them in already.
Subsidizing new cars isn't a great idea. The government is still moving money around, which is inefficient. Its like moving energy-there is some loss for administration at the least. When the government does it, they have to raise taxes, which creates disincentives on the margin. This ends up being another bailout for the auto industry as well. If the industry really needs all of the money we are giving them, we should have let them collapse and move all of that capital to places where it would actually do some good. But, if we are going to do the whole stimulus thing, and we aren't going to cut taxes like we should, then this seems like a marginally acceptable way to do it.
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
True, but most (90%?) of the cars i see have one (1) person in them.
A 75 kilo/150 pound person using a 750 kilo/1500 pound contraption to transport him or herself
just doesn't seem logical to me. I think an internal combustion engine is beautifull, but do we need one per person? And i think boosting car sales and being more energy efficient are difficelt to combine, even with the more efficient and cleaner engines, but the net effect might be positve, i'm certainly no expert.
Two kids on a bike is easy, just not on a mountain bike, or indeed, on a mountain ; ).
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
A lot has happened on this front already, see http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090731/ap_on_go_co/us_cash_for_clunkers and http://www.nbc-2.com/Global/story.asp?S=10832983
Fuck yeah, man, America! Fuck libraries, fuck GameSpot, fuck buying used things, let's all do the patriotic thing and buy new, new, new! CONSUME CONSUME CONSUME!
"Fiscally conservative" is basically "colluding with big car companies to make more profits?" Guess what? When you buy old cars, you're also putting money back in another American's hands, and you're keeping a useful resource (a working vehicle) from just rotting away.
This was on NPR national coverage earlier this week.
Within 24 hours of the news getting out that the program was out of money congress rushed a pre-recess bill to the floor to make sure 2 billion they had in reserve for this program was authorized for disbursement.
Hate to put a damper on all the anti-government diatribes, but congress realized this form of stimulus has worked, and have been swift to see it continues.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Another BAD choice by the Americans.
Why do away with functional vehicles that serve a purpose and get the americans indebted even more?
Why increase the US deficit even more and give the money to the people which will get loans to finance a new(er) car.
Peter Schiff had a recent videoblog about this.
So this bank holiday is true?
Don't worry about being an ass. That's a legitimate claim.
I don't see why the American government couldn't prevent this type of skirting of our laws. Ross Perot mentioned the "giant sucking sound", and while that might be applicable to Detroit, he really meant the migration of American jobs to lower-wage Mexican factories.
If we care about Americans, it behooves us to think about exactly the kind of anti-American job migration that you mention. If you're an ass, then, brother, we're both motherfucking asses.
They estimated that $1 billion would be enough. They figured that would last for six months time.
It barely lasted 2 weeks.
This is why central economic planning doesn't work, and why shortages ran rampant throughout the Soviet Union and eastern communist countries. Simply put - Government politicians are no good at running an economy. They don't have the necessary skills.
I suppose all those executives at lehman brothers and AIG were so much better right?
and I suppose robber barrons, cartels, MAFIAA, and health insurance firms are providing so very well for the populace at large!
There is only one real difference between public and private management of the economy: The government is, at least mildly,ACCOUNTABLE.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
If the economy and the fall of the major auto makers haven't put dealerships out of business, this program surely will. Many dealerships have already delivered multiple $4500 rebates to their customers, and have yet to be reimbursed. It looks doubtful that they ever will. Many of the deals have yet to be accounted for by the NHTSA system due to glitches and server load. So... not only is this idea horrible from a national fiscal policy point of view, but now the very businesses that this is intended to help out, which are already struggling, are being forced to give large interest free loans to the federal government that very well may never be repaid.
Buying a car is one of the most patriotic things you can do outside of buying a home
And if you can't afford either of those, the third-most patriotic thing you can do is smash some windows, because that puts money in the hands of the insurance claims processor, the workman who fixes the window, the glass manufacturers, and everyone that they buy from...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If the initial 4 billion was supplied that was initially asked for we wouldn't be having this discussion.
So, you really don't know how government works. ALL programs are designed to 'run out' and be extended. This one just has got more public notice then most.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
But it rewards those who were too irresponsible to buy "fuel efficient" cars to begin with..
If that isn't an elitist and offensive attitude, i don't know what is. You sir, can take your prius and shove it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You go for the laughs, but you aren't really making any serious point.
For the uninitiated
Who is losing in this case? What is the waste? The old car that is destroying the environment, tearing up the roads, sucking up valuable oil resources? Good riddance, I say.
While a lot of people have discussed the idiocy of this program (rewarding people who made bad decisions, destroying working cars, and vastly underfunding the program), another point we should consider is that this program is probably a direct result of the US government's continuing involvement in the US auto companies. I doubt there would be as much support for a cash for clunkers program, if it wasn't for the fact that US government directly or through the UAW owns two of the three car companies. So in addition to the direct bailouts, somewhere above 50 billion dollars, we have at least a billion (and perhaps as much as 3 billion, if Congress continues to fund the program) thrown away in an attempt to generate business for the car companies. This is a classic case of throwing good money after bad.
I wasn't planning to get a car for several more years, but CFC made buying a car early worth it. I had an 05 Scion tC and a (clunker) 94 Dodge Dakota. Cash for clunkers put a new Mini Cooper S in my reach with almost no car payment. So I spent a month selling the Scion, and was due to turn in my clunker Friday morning when the money ran out and the dealer got shy of doing the deal. It left me in a bad spot because I didn't want to buy a car without CFC's at all, but I was now driving a mostly unmaintained unreliable car for a daily driver, since my perfectly good car was already sold. There was no warning things were about to go to crap with the program.
I was lucky things worked out by the end of Friday, but I spent a harrowing 9 hours camped at the dealer making sure I was first in line for any remaining funds in the program, and (slowly) submitting the paperwork to the cars.gov site. Cars.gov was so spotty that I participated in the document submission part (and had better luck than the dealer) to make things go faster.
I never would have gotten involved in the program if I'd known it could have run out at any minute and endangered my finances.
So this "stimulus" money:
Yes, this sounds like a brilliant idea to me.
And on the subject of "improving efficiency of the fleet" - look at the relatively low mileage targets the program has: they consider 26MPG highway to be an improvement? If they REALLY wanted to improve the fleet mileage, they would have insisted upon any car being purchase having at least 40MPG highway.
Sorry, this is just the "bread" part (with the ongoing MJ crap being the "circuses" part).
www.eFax.com are spammers
What a great way to fix a recession caused by people who got into too much debt buying houses they could not afford! Let's make them get rid of their cars and buy new ones for more debt! Credit is the fuel on which the economy runs, you know. If these people stop spending, then by golly, we need to give them more money so that they can KEEP spending DAMMIT!
There is only one real difference between public and private management of the economy: The government is, at least mildly,ACCOUNTABLE.
Really? We should not forget where the current economic meltdown began. Congress, particularly one committee in the House, regulated and looked out for the interests of the nation monitoring the financial health of Fannie and Freddie Mac. Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, both high ranking members of that committeereceived the most political money from Fannie Mae and Fannie Mac over the past 10 years (Obama was in the top 3 as well [quite the coup for someone who has not been in politics that long]). Their failed oversight may have gotten Dodd a sweetheart deal on his home loan, but the rest of us? We get the to pay for the bailout. Those two knuckleheads are still on Congress.
When a company fails, it fails a percentage of the people. When government fails, it fails all of the people.
Accountability in government is a shell game.
Yeah, I think we really need to make gas more expensive. It's taxed to cover the roads, but I think it should also be taxed to cover much of our military spending as well... especially since it seems that our military is primarily used to protect our petroleum supplies these days.
We have to do something to reverse the trend of so-called "urban planners" to put such emphasis on automobiles. We are looking to move, and by far the easiest way for my wife and I to get an apartment between our two jobs and drive in. For my wife, public transit might be an option except the neighborhood is so shitty - but for me, public transit would be a nightmare involving two trains and a bus... all to save a 15-minute drive.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
And making a new car and scrapping the old one consumes no energy at all? How long do you have to run the new car before the amount of fuel you've saved is more than the amount used to build the new car? Before the pollution you've saved is greater than that of putting the old one in landfill?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
There is only one real difference between public and private management of the economy: The government is, at least mildly,ACCOUNTABLE.
Uhhh... are you living in the same country as the rest of us? Corporate executives are accountable... to their respective boards of directors and/or stockholders. If they do things to far out of line, they can certainly expect to loose their jobs. You don't generally see companies spending double their income year after year, as a certain Government who shall remain nameless has been doing for the last year or so.
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
Your argument is a form of the broken window theory. If someone can fulfill their transportation needs by buying a used car vs a new car then the economy will be better off if they buy the used car. Why? Because in such a situation buying a new car is wasteful - some of those people you mentioned - salespeople, managers, workers, etc - could be allocated to generating other resources that actually are in demand and ultimately that will generate more wealth and utility for society.
So yeah, buy a used car if you want to save money
Again, that saved money can be spent on other goods and services which benefit also benefits the American public.
I see absolutely nothing in this story that in any way relates to Technology. This belongs in the Politics section, editors. Please stop cluttering my Slashdot frontpage with anti-government flamebait.
The reality is quite the opposite.
Without government bailouts, the worst a private company can do is to piss away their own money (and that of their clients who have hopefully done their risk-management homework) and go out of business.
When the government screws up, you pay them a trillion dollars at gunpoint so they can try it again.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
I'm not talking about saving gas over the long term. I'm much more interested in the immediate savings gained by changing automobiles right now.
If you're down to your last gulp of water while lost in the American northwest, it makes much more sense to swallow it and give your body what it craves so you can continue before ultimately meeting your doom. It isn't the average consumption that matters.
A friend once said to me, that the motto is "A non-consumer is non-existing." (Sounds better in German.)
Which should be the new "Arbeit macht frei.". (Ok, that back then was way worse. But the mindset is just as fucked up.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Uhhh... are you living in the same country as the rest of us? When corporate heads screw up, they leave the company with tremendous "golden parachute" severance deals, then go on to be hired by some other company at even higher compensation. They most certainly do not end up suffering the way free-market zealots say they should.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
The amount of fossil fuels used in making the new car far outway the amount in savings it will have over the "Clunker" The car companies raised their prices in order to compensate for this rebate, so this is nothing more that a handout to the auto manufacturers. Plain and simple. What people should be doing is learning how to maintain their existing car. I guarantee that a well maintained 20yr car is more fuel efficiant than any 3yr old car, driven by the average American house wife that hasn't had the oil changed since she got it and the engine lights been on for the past 6months.
Agreed. The system makes no sense. There are people for whom an old car is not especially polluting, because they only drive it an average of 5 miles per week. Possibly it is a second vehicle that they keep at a country house. Perhaps they are usually outside the United States.
Giving away taxpayer money causes inflation. The inflation is not only in the dollar generally, but also in the price of new cars. Those who focus on the free taxpayer money they are getting may not realize that the dealer has raised prices.
To me, the "Cash for Clunkers" program seems like government corruption. General Motors failed because of consistent bad management, in which most of its cars were rated poorly by Consumer Reports.
Now taxpayer money is being used to support bad management, and the taxpayer money goes to support people who have enough money that buying a new car is a goal, instead of finding a job, or getting through university.
The U.S. government has no money. In the entire history of the world, it is the entity most deeply in debt.
I've discovered that U.S. citizens do not want to believe that their government is corrupt. When they are presented with evidence of corruption, most avoid awareness.
this was in the pathetic local paper on Wednesday
Without government bailouts, the worst a private company can do is to piss away their own money (and that of their clients who have hopefully done their risk-management homework) and go out of business.
and take hundreds of thousands of people down who are innocent of any wrong-doing and would have virtually no recourse.
I repeat - private industry is unaccountable.
Now, if you want to introduce regulation which is actually effective at cutting systematic risk like this out of the picture i'm all ears, but we both know that won't happen.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Car dealer: 'If they can't administer a program like this, I'd be a little concerned about my health insurance'...
Is this a warning sign?
Let's compare this program to the program of handing out tax rebates by the previous administration. This program has several goals: 1. Stimulate spending (I don't necessarily like this, but I think at this point in time, it may be helpful.) 2. Promote fuel efficiency. The tax rebate program handed out $300 to pretty much everyone, sometimes more. I lived in Canada at the time of the rebate programs, but still paid lots of taxes to the US, so I qualified. At the time, I was a Post Doctoral Fellow, and had some student loans from 18 years of college. I used the rebates to pay down these loans. I have no clue how this rebate spending stimulated the economy. I am positive that I am not the only one who spent the rebate money in this way. It would be interesting to see which program in the long term has the better outcome. My guess is on a program which supports heavy industry as well as on fuel efficiency, rather than paying for books from 10 years earlier.
No, Medicaid covers that particular case. More often, the problem is "Sorry, you're not poor enough"....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Building a new car burns-up the equivalent of 50,000 miles worth of gasoline (2000 gallons). And if that new car uses an exotic technology like hybridization, then it burns even more energy to build the battery. This is because you need to burn fuel to drive the bulldozers or chisels that mine the metal or rubber, the fuel to move the metal/rubber to the factory, and energy to melt the metal/rubber/plastic into useable products.
Driving an older car is better for the environment (saves 2000 or more gallons), and smashing an old car truly is the equivalent to smashing windows just to "make work". The only time upgrading makes sense is if the old car is belching smoke, but as long as it keeps passing State Emissions Tests then it's cleaner than buying new.
It's especially a waste to destroy all the parts.
Those nuts/bolts/radiators/et cetera should be recycled into repairing other cars, but instead Congress chose to destroy them. Tehy are following the old "throwaway" paradigm rather than the greener "reuse" philosophy. Bad, bad, bad policy.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
If Americans truly want to keep those crap jobs here in America, then they should be willing to accept the same wages as a Mexican (a few dollars an hour). It's Americans unwillingness to give-up their $30/hour union jobs for an $8/hour union job that makes the factory closeup and move.
And of course the government could help-out by lowering taxes, so that it's possible to survive on that minimum wage factory job.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I agree with most of what you are saying, assuming you are being sarcastic about the fiscally conservative part. It's sad that we seem to have no fiscal conservatives serving us, and those who are supposedly fiscally conservative want to keep extending this wasteful program. I myself drive an old car, with many, many miles on it. It actually gets pretty good mileage (about 30mpg), but I'm sure it's considered dirty, because it's not OBDII.
It makes me wonder, with all this "saving" of the environment we are doing, how much are we wasting resources, money and time, and how much pollution is in fact produced when we personally buy a new car rather than fixing an old car or continuing to maintain it. In the time that my car has served me, others would buy as many as 3 cars.
I'm all for that, as long as that's what the market allows them to do. But subsidies are ridiculous and wasteful on many different levels.
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
Nobody is buying a car "just because" of this. The truth is that this recession has been driven by two things. The primary factor is that people panicked. EVERYONE freaked out, THE SKY IS FALLING. The second factor is simply a side effect of the first one, banks backed off on giving credit, even to people who were low-risk.
The cash for clunkers program is enough to get both groups to calm down and face reality. People have a lot of money, they just aren't spending it. Banks have money, they just aren't giving credit to low-risk people.
A lot of fuckups made everyone gun shy towards dealing with the safe bets that drive our economy. Cash for clunkers put just enough money into the groups that are panicked to calm them down.
What those people need is the new 250mpg German car which holds just two people, and weighs about 200 pounds. It's perfect for 99% of our trips (to-and-from work or store). For the other 1% you can either drive separately (wife and kid in one; husband and kid in another), or hire a delivery truck to bring your new sofa home from the store.
Driving a Ford Living Room everywhere you go makes little sense.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
When you buy old cars, you're also putting money back in another American's hands, and you're keeping a useful resource (a working vehicle) from just rotting away.
Bu... but.... the car company weasels need your money _MUCH_ more than other Americans do!! How else are the big car companies going to pay off the consequences of the last few of decades worth of really lousy business decisions like colossal over investment in SUV production if not with massive injections of taxpayer money? Why, if we don't do as the industry lobbyists are saying and feed the big car companies lots of tax dollars actually intended for more socially beneficial projects, car companies might actually have to get off their ass and come up with some original ideas. Like designing and manufacturing more fuel efficient vehicles and selling them to the public _WITHOUT_ government subsidies. Oh the horror, the horror....
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
In regards to passing State Emissions Tests as being the bar before buying a new car. Here in Florida we did away with these tests about 10 years ago. I assumed we did away with them because it was so easy to cheat on them to get your car to pass emissions for a day or 2 with a little bottle of fuel additives. I'm unsure how many other States no longer have these tests as well.
Just think of how efficient health care will be! This sounds a lot like the FEMA contracts back during Katrina. Heavy equipment operators had to abandon their work because the gov't owed them for contract work they'd already done. Gotta love government!
More information that gives a view of U.S. car manufacturing, and the U.S. government in general:
G.M.'s Road From Prosperity to Crisis
The U.S. government bought 60% of G.M., a company with $172.81 billion in debt and $82.29 billion in assets.
Death and Taxes poster.
The "Financial Services Modernization Act" of 1999 is mostly to blame for our current mess. If we hadn't allowed banks to merge into such large conglomerates, none of them would have been "too big to fail" and the bailouts would not have been considered.
When foreign based companies are allowed to lobby congress and achieve a very high rate of return on their lobbying dollars, there's no hope for the people.
It's not so clear cut.
Those salespeople and managers, who you'd make stop working on new cars, are probably in their mid 40s or 50s, and are relatively unemployable. Retraining somebody leads to huge costs, and even if they find some poor sob that would rather have people in their 50s with no experience instead of someone in their 20s with no experience, they'll still end up working for much lower salaries, which has a negative net effect in the economy for quite a few years. With hiring being down instead of up, major layoffs can even start chain reactions, wrecking havoc in the economy.
Instead, it's far better to waste for a short time if we believe that the vehicle demand would naturally go back up in a couple of years, just like it's better to lose a bit of money on a few quarters rather than fire 25% of all competent staff and having to re-hire replacements a year or two later.
Your plan only makes sense if we expected the jobs to have to be subsidized for at least the next 5 years or so. And if that is the case, America is in for a hellish ride regardless.
>>>I suppose all those executives at lehman brothers and AIG were so much better right?
I think you've forgotten that they were acting on behest of the Congressional mandate to "sell more houses to the poor," even when the buyers could put zero-money down, or afford the payments. Congress even threatened to sue banks that turned-down mortgage requests. So your example is just yet another case of Government Ineptitude - driving the housing market into a bubble, and then into the ground.
If Congress had kept hands-off, banks would have used credit checks and other traditional measures to deny mortgages to unworthy (poor) individuals, the housing bubble would not have happened, and we'd not be in a post-crash situation.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I thought this recession was caused by our country's excessive commercialism. How is encouraging the same behavior going to help? $4500 is not going to help a poor family buy a new car, so this amounts to handouts to people who would have been approved for their car loans without it. Why can't I get a free $4500 to put toward my student loans since we are just throwing money around? I don't even own a car. I use public transportation for all my travel. I'm greener than a fucking shamrock. Stop giving my money to people more affluent than I am.
the government could help-out by lowering taxes
You must be new here. Lowering taxes gives the government less influence over those who vote for them.
P.S.
>>>The government is, at least mildly,ACCOUNTABLE.
Yes but only once every two years. The businesses/banks are accountable all the time - every day. Everytime you spend a dollar (or not) you are exerting power over the business, so if it's maximum accountability that you want, then less government and more power to the consumer is what you need.
Back when I was just a student my boss at Sears reminded me of this. I had foolishly hung-up on a customer, and the store manager then chewed me out, saying that now only did we lose a $1000 refrigerator sale, we also lost a customer for life, which is worth about $50,000 longterm.
That's the power we consumers have over business.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Doesn't this just create an artificial bump in purchasing now keeping dealerships open that can't survive after the program ends?
Nonsense....the program gives you $4500 max on your trade-in. If you have a Hummer, you would get much more than $4500 for the trade. Nobody owning a Hummer is using the cash-for-clunkers program. The only people trading in cars are people that own cars that should have been off the road a decade ago and are worth less than $4500 now.
No culture has survived the recognition that they can vote themselves access to the public trough.
Not one.
How long do you have to run the new car before the amount of fuel you've saved is more than the amount used to build the new car?
Never. It takes vastly more energy to produce a new car than the car will ever consume. Even thirsty old Volvo 240s will be thundering away well past the end of their 22-year design lifespan, still consuming 24mpg and *still* nowhere near the amount of energy it took to make them.
Even the more far-out wacky environmental groups are agreed on this - it makes no economic or ecological sense to keep churning out new cars that are only a tiny bit cleaner than the old cars they replace, taking ten times as much energy to produce.
Your argument is a form of the broken window theory.
I won't argue the merit of your case, but you are confusing the parable of the broken window with a sociological theory which alleges to describe the positive effect that ameliorating environmental blight can have on curbing negative social interactions (i.e. that fixing broken windows can reduce crime).
IIRC, you aren't legally required to destroy all the parts - just the engine and drive train.
The submitter and nearly everybody else here seems to have totally missed the most relevant aspect, namely that this was fundamentally an IT problem.
There was a gas-gauge style graphic on the cars.gov web site, which displayed "real time" status of funds remaining. As of Thursday evening, the it was still showing $779 million remaining for most cars (excluding certain trucks) out of the initial $1 billion, and the last update time for the display clearly indicated 10:00am. Meanwhile dealers were already waving off customers, telling them that the program was suspended. Consider that you tell your boss in the morning that your project is going fine, with 3/4 of your budget remaining, only to realize by that same afternoon that your budget has actually been over-spent.
There are several IT angles here. First, when the program officially started July 25, there was only a single server hosting both the consumer and the dealer interfaces. The site was unusably slow for dealers to submit; this caused the first wave of the backlog to begin. They eventually split the application onto two servers; you can see even now that they suffixed /dealer/ as a URL path to the php pages, indicating which components are being served from the hastily added new server.
The initial backlog was magnified in the second wave, as the site has a horribly counter-intuitive user interface, meaning dealers were submitting large documents multiple times for each form page. The system requires scanned documents to be attached, and of course you can imagine what resolutions might be used by technically-naive dealers.
So the IT systems say that only 40,000 deals have been entered into the system. Only the reality is that well over 200,000 deals have been done, and they didn't realize this because they trusted the metrics. There's a 5-to-1 backlog, only 4 days into the program. Meanwhile, reports surface that a typical dealer says 150 deals were submitted to the site, yet only 30 submission confirmations were received in return, and every single one was a rejection.
Yes, I'd pin this fiasco squarely on the shoulders of the incompetent IT developers who built a crappy system that was totally inadequate for the task (but don't forget the incompetent managers that let it happen, blindly followed broken metrics, etc.). I think it's lucky that this was detected at all; this backlog could easily have gone undetected for months, in which case the program might have been overspent by many times over!
Yes, this story is indeed an interesting Technology tale, but unfortunately the submitter and editor seem to have entirely missed that point.
Building a new car burns-up the equivalent of 50,000 miles worth of gasoline (2000 gallons).
I'm of the opinion that this program is your traditional governmental stupidity. Take tax payer dollers and waste them on subsidizing peoples bad habits instead of trying to actualy force improvement. Think of what these billions of dollars could do for public transportation. However, I lack sufficient justification to make a strong case. If you've got something other than your memory to back up those numbers I'd love to see it.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
(Obama was in the top 3 as well [quite the coup for someone who has not been in politics that long]).
Obama received record donations across the board. Since political money is grouped by employer, a side effect of this is that he appears to be one of the top recipients of money from every major corporation. Yet for some reason, I never hear people saying that he's a shill for the University of California (his largest 'donor'). And for the record, if you compare the per-capita employee donations for Fannie and Freddie to the per-capita donation for the U.S. as a whole, you'll find that it's a factor of two less. I'm tired of correcting this fallacy, and I get the impression I'm going to keep seeing these asinine comments until 2012.
I hear that the export market for clunkers from Mexico is picking up nicely...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Mod this guy informative if nothing else.
If these cars were going toward recycling it would be one thing, but destroying many of the perfectly good parts just to prevent it being sold as a used car later on is incredibly wasteful.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
I'm much more interested in the immediate savings gained by changing automobiles right now.
The immediate savings? OH you mean replacing your liability-only insurance policy and your complete lack of a monthly car payment with probably a 100% increase in insurance costs and several hundred dollars in recurring monthly car payments over the next several years. Never mind the fact that the vehicle you have to trade in will probably last you as long as it would take you to pay off a new one.
Who is losing in this case? What is the waste? The old car that is destroying the environment, tearing up the roads, sucking up valuable oil resources? Good riddance, I say.
And Jose the construction worker continues to drive his 12mpg 1987 GMC pickup because the 16mpg 1993 GMC pickup he would have bought from Joe Middleclass for $3000 instead was destroyed by the government so they could give GM a handout. I say good riddance to myopic economic analysis like yours.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
$1,000,000,000 / $4,500 / 7 days = 31,746 cars sold per day
The average number of new cars sold in the US over the period from 1999 through 2006 is 22,156 (according to Ward's, Motor Vehicle Facts & Figures 2007 (Southfield, MI: 2007), p. 22)
To burn through a billion dollars in one week, when the global auto industry has had one of the absolute worst years on record should make major headlines.
"Sales figures through roof as result of C.A.R.S. program"
"Auto makers sell record in record numbers, in excess of 31,000, surpassing the historic average by 25%"
Even at $800,000,000, they would need to sell in excess 25,000 vehicles - EVERY DAY for ONE WEEK to make the numbers work.
There's a hole in my bucket, Dear Liza, Dear Liza..
Tehy are following the old "throwaway" paradigm rather than the greener "reuse" philosophy. Bad, bad, bad policy.
This is only speculation, but I would bet that cars are the most reused and recycled consumer product in the US. Ever heard the saying, "How come my $1,000 car has so many $200 parts?"? Ever been to a junk yard/pick and pull yard?
I don't get the cash for clunkers thing. Seems like more sensationalism politics.
Yes, it IS that clear cut.
The fact that the glazier may not know any other skills in no way invalidates the reasoning behind the broken window fallacy.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Look at The Big Dig in Massachusetts. A 1985 estimate placed the cost of The Big Dig at $2.8 billion ($6.0 billion adjusted for inflation as of 2006), and yet $14.6 billion ($8.08 billion in 1982 dollars) has been spent on the project since 2006.
Nah, the poor have cars, they just have to stay with their unsafe, polluting old cars because they can't afford to buy a new car and the better used car they would have bought has been destroyed to give GM a handout.
Its the No Airbags for Mexicans Program
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I think you've forgotten that they were acting on behest of the Congressional mandate to "sell more houses to the poor,
bullshit.
the CRA was against "red-lining", denying people loans based on GEOGRAPHIC AREA rather than actual credit history.
They were penalizing otherwise responsible people for NOT being pretentious and opting to live in areas most people snubbed.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
You can't do this though without changing not just the taxes, but the price of everything to match the lowest common denominator (that being the country that can produce product the cheapest). If Mexico can pay people $2/hr to build a car, try paying that to Americans when the cost of a house is $200k+. Even renting an apartment would be out of their financial reach. The workers won't be able to afford anything.
I don't foresee corporate globalization changing direction any time soon. You'll find that America's standard of living will drop, while other countries will see theirs rise, until some sort of equilibrium is reached.
Of course at that point you'll have One World Government, One World Currency, and the dreams of the NWO will be achieved.
and take hundreds of thousands of people down who are innocent of any wrong-doing and would have virtually no recourse.
There is no slavery in the U.S. When you see your company engaging in reckless and/or corrupt behavior that can not sustain it over the long term LEAVE. Go get another job. That's what you are entitled to do.
That your 'solution' is 'regulation' isn't surprising. You want a managed economy. "The new Five Year Plan guarantees we will build 15,000,000 new tractors, and the output from the potato sector will liberating. On with the people's revolution."
This wasn't a bad idea in general, just badly implemented. What they should have done is offered this incentive to anyone buying a model that meets a 30MPG rating from the EPA as it would have included Used Cars. Doing it this way would result in more guzzlers being pulled from the market and being sent to the scrap yard where they can then be recycled.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
The Gov't and people in general would get a LOT more sympathy on this if the requisite mpg weren't so low. I'm a really frugal person. I am at present driving a 1995 Buick. It (Of course!) doesn't meet those standards. In fact, going back through - NO Buick Lesabre - a standard 4 door sedan - is at or below the 18 mpg ceiling from 1985 onwards. I admit some of this is just me being bitter, but it certainly seems like a reward of excess to some degree. After all why buy a 4 door car for a family of four when you can buy an extended cab pickup? Sidenote: To the ***** who bought a hummer and can still make use of this "promotion" - I hate you.
Here's one article that tries to put some numbers behind this idea (buying new efficient vs. re-using old clunker). It compares a new Prius (plus its manufacturing energy) vs. a used Corolla (no slouch in mpg). The new Prius wins out (573 million BTUs over its lifetime for gas+production of Prius vs. 701 million BTUs for gas only for Corolla).
There's other data out there support this idea. Obviously it depends on the cars under comparison, but there are some winning scenarios under cash-for-clunkers.
ARE YOU UNPATRIOTIC, SIR?
They don't keep junk cars for long anymore, the field of half stripped rusting junkers is mostly a thing of the past.
But they do strip all sell-able parts before shipping the shell to the scrap yard.
It's called a 'for profit business'.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Agree mostly, but...
:(
The "building new car and scrapping old one" energy costs as well as the benefits of the improved MPG of the new car need to be amortized over the car's life. If a car would typically last 200K miles and it's scrapped prematurely under CARS at 100K miles, basically during the owner's lifetime an additional 1/2 a new car will need to be built and an additional 1/2 of an old car scrapped. Similarly, the benefit of the MPG increase is only for the remaining life of the old car. (For simplicity, I'm ignoring the energy costs related to repairing the older car in it's last 100K miles - I assume these are minor compared to the original manufacturing energy costs).
On the other hand, since new car MPG will continue to rise, this program has a (hopefully smaller) delayed bubble effect in a few years. The cars being purchased "early" under the program will be on the road for a while - say 15 years - while the cars being junked might have stayed on the road for another five years and then be replaced with a car that probably gets better mileage than the prematurely purchased car does. Thus, ten years from now, the average MPG of cars on the road will likely be lower than if CARS had never existed. Hopefully the increase of the average MPG of cars on the road between than and now due to CARS will more than offset this.
All I know is, I wouldn't want to be a college student or poor person (is that redundant?) trying to buy a $1500 beater right now
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
there is nothing "fiscally conservative" about this plan and most people that call themselves "fiscally conservative" probably oppose it. I do. This is being pushed by people "fiscally liberal" who want to spend money we don't have to fix a problem that the program won't fix.
Hi Government, Can I get a $4500 tax rebate to buy a Titanium bike with a trailer? I can cut the emissions to zero if I quit eating energy bars during trips. Thanks
Burn FAT not OIL
I don't know about the auto workers, but as for me, when you reduce the cost of living here to be the same as Mexico, I'll take the Mexican wages. It's the corporate unwillingness to give-up a $30 margin for an $8 margin that makes the workers refuse to take a pay cut.
Corporations that build there and sell here simply want to convert everyone's decades of economic prosperity into cash for their pockets only. It's a massive externality that needs to be internalized, perhaps by tariffs for imported manufactured goods. The proceeds from that can then be used to replace the income lost in the tax cut you suggest.
A tax credit for large vehicles was created in the mid-1980s to help farmers and small business owners purchase trucks and other large vehicles needed for hauling. But anyone who is self-employed could apply for the credit and any vehicle weighing more than 6,000 pounds, including large SUVs and Hummers, which get 8 to 13 miles per gallon, could qualify. Originally the amount was $17,500. But soon the amount grew. As the tax credit limit has increased, so did the number of claims.
6 or 7 years ago congress passed a tax bill, as proposed in President Bush's economic stimulus plan, that offered a $100,000 tax credit for business owners who purchase large vehicles.
Not all these vehicles purchase with with huge tax payers subsidy, can now be replaced with help from tax payers.
Both programs were bad ideas. The growth of the SUV market was largely due to these hand-outs. It also perverted the market and may be partially to blame for our auto industry failure.
Without government bailouts, the worst a private company can do is to piss away their own money (and that of their clients who have hopefully done their risk-management homework) and go out of business.
When the government screws up, you pay them a trillion dollars at gunpoint so they can try it again.
But the problem is that these private companies have huge debts with each other. So if a few big banks/insurers go, they all go. The regular economy is hugely dependent on the banks, so they will crash as well. We would lose much more money in the long run. Look at the Great Depression.
This Cash for Clunkers isn't really about getting old cars off the road, it's about getting new cars out of the showrooms, where they've been sitting unsold for quite some time. It's about stimulating the auto industry, and getting sales moving along. Note that you can't trade in your old clunker on a perfectly good 2-4 year old second-hand car, it has to be new.
Here in Australia, the Government had a similar scheme, although it worked differently, the end result is the same. It was called the Small Business Investment Allowance. If you purchased a capital asset for your business, you could depreciate an extra 50% of that asset in the first year you own it. This applies to motor vehicles, but only if they're brand-new. Not even an ex-demo car that a salesman has driven home in a couple of times, it has to be new.
I took advantage of the situation and got a turbo-diesel VW Golf, and I've halved my fuel bills.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
For people who don't know what you are referring to, the Broken Window Fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
I'm sure that many are very proud of themselves because the government was so inefficient in determining how to run this program that they ran out of money in a week. Had anyone sat down for a few minutes they would have known that the number is easily closer to 4 million cars to sell under this program.
But the Austrian Economists are screaming at this program because of the distortions is applies to the economy. No one is saving money by doing this, they are going into debt, albeit at a discount. And all this money is coming from some other sector of the market that will now suffer a multi-billion dollar loss. Resulting in more industry crisis and bailouts as we chase down the Forgotten Man and try to provide reparations.
This is yet another horrible idea pushed out by horrible government who have short sighted views of not what is best for the economy and this nation but what is best for them to get re-elected in the next couple of years.
Without removing the Federal Reserve, Fractional Reserve Banking, and returning to the Gold Standard we simply must repeat these boom/bust cycles until the currency collapses and everyone loses all of their wealth. At least those who fail to convert to harder assets or assets in another country.
Not everybody is involved in making cars.
Not everybody wants to spend their money on cars right now. What if we wanted to buy houses instead? We can't because you stole our money from us under the guise of For the Public Good
This is the argument of a socialist.
In 1929 the US Government decided to follow the social and economic ideologies of the new and seemingly highly successful communist nation of USSR. So how's that Communist society been working out for them? Compared to the United States Free Market? Certainly a case of Less Bad.
>>>>> Teeh Congress is following the old "throwaway" paradigm rather than the greener "reuse" philosophy. Bad, bad, bad policy.
>>This is only speculation, but I would bet that cars are the most reused and recycled consumer product in the US
I think I'm going to stop talking, because people clearly are not listening. When I say Congress crushes every nut, bolt, radiator, et cetera, that's what I mean. The entire car has to be trashed according to this Cash for Clunkers program. Bloody stupid.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
wouldn't it be better if the gov simply coordinate all the production and distribution of cars? without all the silly indirect 'incentives'. actually let's do that for all the goods and services. we'll never have any economic instability, unemployment, or shortage of stuff. how come nobody has every come up with such an obvious idea?
>>>You'll find that America's standard of living will drop, while other countries will see theirs rise, until some sort of equilibrium is reached.
>>>
Isn't that essentially what I said with the recommendation that American workers drop their wages from $30/hour to $7/hour? If they want the factories to stay here then that's what they have to be willing to negotiate.
And as for living on that money, I could do it. But then I also don't have non-necessities like cable TV, a $60/month cellphone, or $50/month internet.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
But isn't that cost just being postponed? I mean, the car will eventually fail and require replacement.
>>>perhaps by tariffs for imported manufactured goods.
Doing that is what extended a minor market crash in 1929 into a decade-long depression. Tariffs kill trade and destroy an economy. A wiser course is for Americans to simply take a paycut. For example - a local Harley factory is leaving because they can no longer afford to pay their workers $25/hour. If the workers were willing to take a cut downto, say, $10/hour than they could keep their jobs.
But since the workers are being stubborn, they will lose their jobs as the factory moves to someplace cheap like Alabama or Arkansas, where workers are willing to take $10/hour.
It usually doesn't pay to be greedy.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Hum, so what your saying is in a way the government has managed to somewhat do what it intended to do all along right? Increase growth. I mean, the 12mpg 1987 truck will die someday.
Fine and dandy, but I don't see their bills being chopped in half. And when companies go get cheap labor, I don't see them chopping their prices to match.
Giving away taxpayer money causes inflation. The inflation is not only in the dollar generally, but also in the price of new cars. Those who focus on the free taxpayer money they are getting may not realize that the dealer has raised prices.
Actually, giving away taxpayer money only causes inflation if the money supply increases. If you have people on the other side not paying loans back, that money created by fractional lending is effectively destroyed and the real money supply contracts. Since so many people are simply not paying loans back, dropping tons of money onto the economy isn't going to have an inflating effect.
This is my sig.
Republican bitching about GM is a total fraud.I keep hearing so-called conservatives moan about GM and the how the government shouldn't have bailed them out. They talk up the free market as if they believe in it and the truth is, they don't. The very same conservative movement that rips the northern based GM has absolutely no problem lining up to the government dole when it comes to protectionism for American food products and subsidies for American farmers. Jeff Sessions, Republican, publicly ripped GM so much, and defended Honda and Toyota so much, that, I went and made a Japanese style state flag for his home state of Alabama....:
http://www.treatyist.com/issue1/alabamasnewflag.aspx
Pretty much, Republicans have movie stars doing "Got Milk" advertisement, "Beef, its what's for dinner...".. like, the USA needs to have the government advertising fucking food. Every year American farmers get the same out of amount money that GM gets, in either direct subsidies or benefits from protectionism, and THAT, of course, based on most conservatives that I talked too, is somehow "different."
Moral of the story is this, Republicans have no credibility on balanced budgets, no credibility on economic national security, and no credibility on nationalism in general. If the GOP wants to regain its self respect, then red states must balance their budgets, and get off the federal dole themselves.
This is my sig.
- Now today that same suit still costs about quarter-ounce of gold, but 300 dollars paper money.
Except that, these days, a person would have multiple suits, all sorts of clothes, a couple of cars, more food than you can possibly eat, houses that are quite frankly beyond anything all but the richest in the 1920s could have dreamed of, video games, air conditioning, TV, and more.
Because of this, you could make the argument that the 300 paper dollars is worth far more than the 5 paper dollars was in the 1920s.
All of that was made possible because when you have fractional reserve lending, you create pools of money that can be invested in the creation of new products. If we had to wait for someone to dig up gold, we'd be worthless.
What goldbugs never fail to appreciate, is that gold doesn't have anymore "natural" value than paper money. Gold's supposed value is just as much fiat as paper money is. Whether you declare your money to be based on gold, based on paper, based on apples, or oranges, or an entire economy, money is always going to be fiat. The only non-fiat money this country had was the bank notes of the late 19th century and that turned out to be a disaster.
What the hell is gold actually good for? At least a dollar can help me light a fire or wipe my ass with it. Can't do that with gold. Gold's a terrible metal to make stuff with.. its too soft. All it is kinda shiny. But who cares about a kinda shiny rock when you have LCD screens that shine way more.
This is my sig.
This is why I didn't mess around with my Cash for Clunker deal.
Last February, my 1999 Town and Country minivan was totaled by a serious fender bender / mild accident. I got about $5k from the insurance after opting to keep the drivable yet ugly car for $250. I then drove it around for a few months until the bearings started doing funny things, and I could tell that it was getting no longer safe to drive.
Long story short, a friend told me about the CARS act, so the second it was signed into law I decided I was going to go for it. Figuring that the program might run out quickly, or it would be difficult to find the car that I wanted during the rush, I found a local dealership that was pre-selling cars (ie, taking deposits, getting the car on the lot, etc..) in early July, and put a $500 refundable deposit down on a new Toyota RAV4.
Only the evening of July 26th, I drove my potentially unsafe (yet still insured, for the record) minivan over to the dealership in the middle of the night. Monday morning I walked in and got my new RAV4 (which was already on the lot, with all the paperwork done) with my $4500 credit. I'm very happy, since there is no way I would have been able to afford a new car without the program. It's also pretty damned amusing that I got nearly $10,000 (insurance+CARS act credit) out of a minivan that probably wasn't worth more than $4k before the accident.
There is only one real difference between public and private management of the economy: The government is, at least mildly,ACCOUNTABLE.
I don't know what government YOU'RE talking about, but surely it cannot be the US government that can simply refuse to comment and reasonably expect every news station to instead report on where Michael Jackson is being buried (breaking news: OR MAYBE HE ISN'T!!!).
1987 Plymouth == so dirty it's banned from sale within the U.S. (except as an older used car)
With all due respect, was there any chance of anyone selling 1987 Plymouths in a form other than an older used car?
Ask Me About... The 80's!
There is no stimulus in the CARS bill.
The major American automakers (and I use that term loosely) STILL HAVE STOCK OF 2008 MODEL YEAR CARS.
The 2010's are due out....and they haven't even sold off all the 2008's yet!
Just go to GM's website and look at current offers for your area - at the back of the list are all the deals on '08s.
This stock was generated because of the sweetheart deal the unions had over GM - even laid off, union employees of GM make 95% of full-time salary. So GM just never stopped producing cars. It doesn't make sense to - your biggest cost (labor) still hits you.
This is just back-stock being purchased now. It will create no new production, because there's still a looooooong way to go to sell off all the backlog and clear out all the parking lots in/around Detroit.
Yay! Thank you for making this point. Though when you say, even the more for-out wacky environmental groups get this, there needs to be some clarification. Ones that are really serious & able to look at the big picture of consumption do. But a huge chunk of the middle, & those extreme ones who put it on like a coat, don't/aren't able to do anything close to look at it this way. "Oil...Bad." "Hybrid...Good."
Why have almost all the conservationists been replaced by environmentalists? Impending ice age...global warming...global climate change. I don't give a rats ass. Don't use more than you need and don't dump shit into the air, sea or land.
Vote Quimby.
Sure. But do the math. We manufacture less cars. And it's a safe bet each year we put off buying a new car, manufacturing will require less energy & raw materials.
Vote Quimby.
Lol. Yeah, because the lifetime of a Prius is well established at 11.5 years because of all that data on 10 year old Priuses. And that vague handwaving/guess gesture to come up with the BTUs to product a Prius are so accurate.
All I know is, I wouldn't want to be a college student or poor person (is that redundant?) trying to buy a $1500 beater right now :(
I dunno. While it's going to take a nice chunk of beaters out of the market, an artificial increase in new cars will probably mean quality used cars will drop in price. Which should slide all prices down. Well except for new cars. Dealers not being stupid, they will raise - or more accurately not discount as much - their prices on new cars because the people buying them are working on a timeframe and are getting $3500-$4500 from the feds.
Vote Quimby.
the worst a private company can do is to piss away their own money (and that of their clients who have hopefully done their risk-management homework)
And given how many people got fucked out of their retirement savings, I'd say the percentage of those "clients" that you describe is decidedly low, because the market got waaaay too fucking complicated, and the experts had their heads too far up each other's asses to see what was really going on.
Seriously, if *really* believe that "the worst a private company can do is piss away their own money", you're too fucking stupid to take part in this conversation.
and take hundreds of thousands of people down who are innocent of any wrong-doing and would have virtually no recourse.
The innocent parties in the current meltdown being...?
I'm bating you, of course, because there are none.
Well, I drive an old tank of a Volvo (1985 240GL), and at the moment I'm getting about 20MPG. The car has been in a garage for almost all of the time that it is not being actively driven, and as such, the chassis is fine. Buying a brand new car seems like a waste.
What I really want to do is find out the local legislation about putting in a newer engine (I'm in Australia), and what right I would have if the police tried to arc up about the fact that it's now an original owner. That being said, locating the legislation is somewhat difficult. Yet another example of bureaucracy getting in the way of positive results, I guess.
each year we put off buying a new car, manufacturing will require less energy & raw materials
Exactly. Don't forget that because that 20-year-old Volvo is mechanically simpler, it can be repaired more easily and cheaply than a modern car. It's *designed* to be repaired. Quite often, it can be repaired with bits taken from another scrapped car - recycling with no environmental cost!
Interesting point... But, I don't think most people who took advantage of CARS were in the market for used cars under $8K and, mostly, they would be able, or nearly able, to buy a new car with or without CARS. I don't see that a $5K used car will suddenly be within reach of the $1500 budget student/poor person because of CARS. I suspect the slide you speak of, while real, would not come close to offsetting the depletion of $1K-$3K cars on the used market. (But then, I'm a software guy, not a microecon guy).
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
You're probably paying attention to the CNW "junk science".
To quote from http://www.pacinst.org/topics/integrity_of_science/case_studies/hummer_vs_prius.pdf:
Another example of an unusual assumption and choice of data is the reported distribution of energy across the different phases of vehicle life. The CNW results suggest that the majority of energy is consumed during the production of the vehicle. These results are at odds with every other study weâ(TM)ve seen on the energy life-cycle costs of automobiles. Other studies independently conclude that the vast majority of energy is consumed during âoevehicle operations,â with lesser quantities used during materials acquisition, fabrication, and vehicle disposal. For example:
â A report produced by a British research firm concluded that more than 90% of all energy used in the motor industry went to vehicle operation; less than 10% went to manufacturing and production.
â The British auto industry trade group estimated in their 2006 sustainability report that life cycle CO2 emissions â" a strong proxy for energy â" are allocated 10% to manufacturing; 85% to use; and 5% to disposal.
â The Center for Sustainable Systems of the University of Michigan, which pioneered and refined the tool of life-cycle assessment, conducted a joint project with Chrysler, Ford,General Motors, the Aluminum Association, the American Iron and Steel Institute, and the American Plastics Council. They analyzed the life-cycle energy costs of the 6 systems, subsystems, and 644 discrete parts and components composed of 73 different materials comprising a typical North American mid-sized car and concluded that more than 85% of all energy is the result of using the car, not making, assembling, repairing, or disposing of it.
â A comprehensive energy life-cycle analysis of a Volkswagen Golf Mark 3 concluded that 73% of total energy is consumed during the use and disposal phases, 11% in materials production, 8% in vehicle manufacturing, and 8% in fuels manufacturing.
â The MIT study, âoeOn the Road in 2020,â reported on a comprehensive energy life-cycle analysis and found that 80% to 90% of all energy was used in the operation stage; 7% to 12% in the materials production stage, and the remainder in vehicle assembly, distribution, and disposal.
â A 2006 study from Argonne National Laboratory concluded that around 75% of all hybrid and internal combustion vehicle energy use comes from the operation of the vehicle. The rest comes mostly from producing the fuels and the manufacture and disposal of the vehicle and its materials.
It goes like this...
Can you get a loan to buy a house? Yes... but only if there is more demand for housing than there is supply. Remember, supply and demand determine value... A bank isn't going to give you that loan if the future value of the house is certain to be lower than the current value.
So, if there are ever enough houses for everyone, they will become valueless because the demand has been satisfied. There is no profit then to be found in housing. Basically, under our economic system, this can never be allowed to happen because there would be no profit the loans are never made. The houses are never built. This is why there is (and must always be) still homelessness, poverty etc. This is also why fashion exists. The key irony of capitalism which purports to be a way of satisfying needs is that the needs must *never* be satisfied.
So... Our money... Paper money makes up only around 5% of all the money which exists. The rest, the other 95% is "borrowed into existence". You go to a bank and get a loan, they *create* $NNN,NNN worth of credit and loan it to you. The bank expects you to pay interest on the loan debt. They expect profit.
What if ... Money was created without debt and interest attached?
What if you had to pay a penalty for hoarding money, rather than being rewarded for it?
Our worldwide society is defined by the monetary system which we use. Why do you think that we have huge multinational corporations? "progress"? Why? It's because organizations *must* grow to service their debts + interest. They have to keep getting bigger and bigger or they will fail.
Deleted
The innocent parties in the current meltdown being...?
I'm bating you, of course, because there are none.
Oh, so the person trying to buy the house now that would have had no trouble 10 years ago, but is having trouble now because of overly restrictive lending practices as a reaction to the meltdown are not affected? How about those that bought general mutual funds with no say in their investments who owned a slice of failing financial institutions? Or, less innocent, people that have ARMs that would have been a better investment if the rates weren't fluctuating as a result of the turmoil? The homeowners that own their home outright and want to sell it who would get less this year than last because of the decrease in values as a direct result of the meltdown? There are a number of complete innocents that will be negatively affected in some way. Yes, the greater the involvement the greater the effect, but that doesn't mean there exist no innocent parties.
Learn to love Alaska
My brother earns $11/hour. If he can survive on that amount of money, so too can the Harley workers. The fact they keep demanding $25/hour instead of negotiating a paycut to save their job is because they are being greedy.
And that greed's going to lead to the factory closing-down and moving. It simply doesn't pay to be stubborn.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
For along time I have mentioned instead of giving any bonuses to the companies involved in making a mess of our economy (yes you GM)...they should have given car buying incentives, meaning that not only would the companies benefit, but also the people.
Give the incentive to the people, then they go buy a car, and then the companies make a profit. Everybody wins...but did they
think of the people, no, they never do!
My one complaint with the wording of the program is that they didn't just say 'if the car you have gets 10 mpg less than the one you are buying, you qualify for the program.' Instead they limited it to your car has to get below 18 mpg and the car your are buying gets at least 10mpg more. There is a limit to how much improvement we can make in fuel efficiency and I don't see why we shouldn't open up the program to everyone for all time. Admittedly the improvement gains are felt more at the beginning of the program, but I appreciate the fact that the program has a limited life span because of limits on improving fuel efficiency.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
When I say Congress crushes every nut, bolt, radiator, et cetera, that's what I mean. The entire car has to be trashed according to this Cash for Clunkers program. Bloody stupid.
Yes, you are. They have to destroy the part of the car that makes carbon, not the whole thing. They can part out the car parts other than the engine. So you are factually incorrect. Congress has enough stupid moves to be blamed for, you don't need to make up more.
Learn to love Alaska
It takes vastly more energy to produce a new car than the car will ever consume.
And the numbers I've seen indicate that a car uses 5-8 times the energy in lifetime use than for creating it. And I at least have something to mention about a source, rather than making stuff up: http://www.pacinst.org/topics/integrity_of_science/case_studies/hummer_vs_prius.pdf
Even the more far-out wacky environmental groups are agreed on this - it makes no economic or ecological sense to keep churning out new cars that are only a tiny bit cleaner than the old cars they replace, taking ten times as much energy to produce.
Uh, no. The wacky environmental groups want CAFE (or its equivelent) raised by 50% (and in GPM, not MPG 50% terms). And they know that trashing a car and replacing it with a more efficient one pays for itself well within the life of the car. At some point that won't be true, but we aren't there yet.
Learn to love Alaska
I think I'm going to stop talking, because people clearly are not listening. When I say Congress crushes every nut, bolt, radiator, et cetera, that's what I mean. The entire car has to be trashed according to this Cash for Clunkers program. Bloody stupid.
And by "the entire car" I assume you mean "the engine and drivetrain" which is all that the CARS program requires to not go back on the road. http://www.cars.gov/faq#category-14
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
One could argue that the _current_ restrictive lending processes should be the norm - so if you can't buy a house now you shouldn't have one.
Why would you buy a mutual fund without an expectation of risk? How is losing money you essentially gambled on the stock market out of the ordinary? People sometimes in fact often lose money in the stock market. Again, the norm.
ARMs were a spectacular investment at some points. I bought one 5 years ago, a 5/1 ARM. It just readusted from 4.375% to 3.8%. ARMs weren't the problem, exotic loans including exotic ARMS and overextended ARMs were the problem.
Homeowners who own their home and get less for it overpaid for their home or expected too much profit from it. In addition, they will be able to purchase a new home for less and the person buying their home gets a better deal.
No innocents, this is business as usual. You rolls your dice and you takes your chances.
Don't get me wrong, I'm far from perfect - nobody is perfect. I've made mistakes and learned a lot through the last few bubbles and hopefully other people have too. I doubt it, though, as Nanny govt steps in to help and people have short memories.
Why do people keep dragging out the rather bogus Hummer-versus-Prius article? What's the point in comparing one gas-guzzler with another gas-guzzler anyway?
It's Americans unwillingness to give-up their $30/hour union jobs for an $8/hour union job that makes the factory closeup and move.
You lost me at "union." That's irrelevant to the wage difference, and bringing it up just seems to add one more confounding factor to the situation, and someone making $30 an hour at a union job or $30 an hour at a non union job is essentially the same, so isn't even relevant. Not to mention that unionizing at minimum wage rarely works (by which I mean pretty much never works).
And of course the government could help-out by lowering taxes, so that it's possible to survive on that minimum wage factory job.
I pay less than 20% in taxes combining all taxes paid by me to the feds, the state, and the local government, including all the indirect taxes I can think of. My direct tax rate (things I pay from my paycheck of by checks) are less than 15% of my income, and I own a home with taxes and a rental property with taxes. And I'm in the top 20% of wage earners, to I should have a larger than average burden. Someone making $7.25 an hour should be paying almost no taxes. At most, 10% federal tax. You can't tell me that someone could "survive" on $15k a year with no government help compared to the same person taking home $13.5k per year with all the government programs. Taxes help the poor. They pay little in and get more out. To assert that lowering taxes will help them if that means that there will be fewer programs to help will hurt, not help them.
Learn to love Alaska
I saw what I think are two logic problems in your post.
First, we're not talking about Cheesy Poofs vs Cheesy Poofs. We're more like talking about Cheese and Pasteurized process cheese product. Like it or not, a SUV has abilities that a Sedan doesn't. For that matter, bigger vehicles have benefits over smaller ones - capacity, if nothing else.
Second, while the savings aren't as big of a deal for an individual, it does become important when you're talking about a government program - where you have to realize that getting somebody out of their 18mpg truck and into a 22 mpg truck (because they actually require a truck, even if only in their mind), is better than getting a dude out of his 30mpg sedan into a 36mpg mild hybrid. So any subsidization program that wants to actually save the most gas for the dollar will look to get the efficiency of the trucks up first.
Which is why I've always wondered why we get such tiny hybrids - there's a lot more money to be saved putting hybrid systems into larger vehicles like UPS/Fedex trucks and busses than compact cars.
If you care about your money and your planet, you'll pick the highest-mpg vehicle that suits your need.
Problem, highest mpg != to most economic, especially when you look at hybrids. Depending on your driving habits, it's quite possible that the hybrid, despite having a higher mpg, won't pay itself off faster than the vehicle will wear out, or statistically be taken out by a crash.
I don't read AC A human right
Why do people keep dragging out the rather bogus Hummer-versus-Prius article?
Because some of the retorts to the initial bogus comparison are well thought out and well documented. It wasn't the comparison that was being referenced, but the percentage of carbon footprint attributed to manufacture vs use.
What's the point in comparing one gas-guzzler with another gas-guzzler anyway?
Well, the Hummer isn't a gas guzzler becasue weren't they diesel only? And the Prius isn't a gas guzzler because it is one of the most petrol-efficient vehicles available. So I'm confused as to why you'd assert they are both gas guzzlers when one doesn't take gasoline and the other is one of the most efficint users of it.
Learn to love Alaska
Well, the Hummer isn't a gas guzzler becasue weren't they diesel only?
That's hair-splitting. It uses a *lot* of diesel.
And the Prius isn't a gas guzzler because it is one of the most petrol-efficient vehicles available
Not even close. If you drive a Prius *extremely* carefully, you can get a whopping 45mpg (UK gallons - 38 miles per US gallon). This compares favourably to an equally carefully-driven VW Golf, at about 42/35mpg (UK/US). If you drive at normal UK road speeds on normal UK roads, the Prius will give you about 36/30mpg (UK/US), which compares reasonably well with a large 20-year-old family saloon.
The Prius is not a fuel-efficient car. It's always hauling around over a hundred kilos of dead weight in batteries, motors and overcomplicated gearbox. It would be more fuel-efficient *without* the hybrid system.
What is your brother doing with that $11/hr? Raising a family? Putting away enough money for retirement? Does he have health insurance?
Unless the answer to those questions are "yes, yes, yes, and yes," then your choice of the word "surviving" is apt.
In the world you're pushing toward, there will be a few very wealthy people, and an entire economy operated primarily by "survivors", but whose output is precisely tuned to fulfill the whims of the wealthy few.
When you compare it to that alternative, "spread the wealth" socialism doesn't sound half bad.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
The various Prius models have been around since 2001. I'm sure we have enough data on failure rates to make some decent extrapolations.
Calculating BTUs doesn't require particularly deep majicks either. Every gallon of gas has a certain amount of stored thermal energy. You burn a gallon of gas, you use that many BTUs.
You see, there's rational skepticism, and then there's "nobody in the world can possibly know anything about anything." Guess which one you're praciticing?
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Wait wait wait. You think that, if you drop from a $30/hr job to an $8/hr job, a tax cut is going to make up the difference?
Let's ignore the fact that if you're making near minimum wage, chances are you're already not paying much of anything in taxes. Your math is still bogus.
What they should do is raise taxes and fund government programs targeted towards easing the misery of the poor. THAT will actually help a minimum wage earner.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
The Slate article quotes 113M BTUs to manufacture a Prius, or 911 gallons worth of gas. In driving, that amount of energy would get you about 40,000 miles. But those are Prius miles, not Escalade miles or Hummer miles.
If we're going to start measuring in "miles worth of gasoline," then we're definitely going to want to build Hummers instead of Priuses. I'll bet you could build a Hummer for 10,000 miles worth of gasoline.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
You've already been told that you're wrong twice. No need for me to belabor the point. No, I'm just chiming in to tell you how much I'm enjoying the fact.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
(Citation? I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours.)
Also, energy costs of manufactured goods aren't laws of nature. Mining, forging, assembling, etc., could all use less energy than they do today. We should be putting the whole economy on an energy diet.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
I myself drive an old car, with many, many miles on it. It actually gets pretty good mileage (about 30mpg), but I'm sure it's considered dirty, because it's not OBDII.
To be fair, this program is for cars with less than 18mpg combined (City/highway averaging). Your car wouldn't be eligible, and rightly so.
This whole debate rather pisses me off, though. Bush spent what? >$800B on bailing out companies that didn't deserve it. The success of those programs is debatable, but billions have already been confirmed as wasted, squandered, and given out in executive compensation. Obama spent even more bailing out companies that didn't deserve it. Democrats then create a $1B program, the only program to help consumers, and it was an enormous success by all measurable metrics... and now everyone is bitching and criticizing that the govt is wasting money?
For the cost of the bailouts, we could have made massive gains against fossil fuel dependency, instituted a program one thousand times as large as CARS, rebuilt New Orleans four times, or replaced every corrupt congressman with an honest one.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
My brother earns $11/hour. If he can survive on that amount of money, so too can the Harley workers. The fact they keep demanding $25/hour instead of negotiating a paycut to save their job is because they are being greedy.
And that greed's going to lead to the factory closing-down and moving. It simply doesn't pay to be stubborn.
The fact that they keep demanding their workers take a pay cut instead of simply accepting lower corporate profits is because they are greedy.
And that greed's gong to lead to the factory closing down and moving, very bad PR, and a loss of many skilled workers. It simply does yield slightly higher short-term corporate profits to fuck your workforce sideways.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling