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The other thing to consider? A person smart with his/her money will drive a car until the wheels fall off. Until the monthly maintenance approaches that of a car payment, keep driving the clunker. So, in order to promote prosperity, the Obama administration is actually convincing Americans to go out on a financial limb to buy new cars when the ones they own will get them from Point A to Point B.
Think back to your parents, grandparents or maybe even great grandparents time. They SAVED the money to buy a car and maintained it well and ran it for years and years. How many people today can even change the oil in their car? $600.00 was a huge amount back then to spend on ANYTHING. But nowadays thanks to corporate greed we finance or worse even lease (rent) a car. After ww2 a car in every American garage was one of THE American dreams, but we didnt buy Hitlers Volkswagon, or Hirohito's Toyota. And the American Cadillac was a world wide status symbol! And By and large a huge segment of America lived close enough to walk to work, or to the butcher, baker etc. But now we dont want to live by commercial areas because of the noise, traffic etc. (Ever hear a senior citizen announce proudly he walked ten miles in the snow to school? ) Probably not ten but a mile or two would be the average. I am 55 yrs old and walked every school day about 3/4 mile, sunny, rain, snow, up to the point it might have gotten to zero degrees (Northern New Hampshire.) My point it we do NOT need to be bailing out mega business because of their bad business decisions. The mortgage meltdown that allowed (or tricked) many into a new home was nothing but corporate greed, if the corporations in America can make obscene profits and get million dollar bonus's then wages should reflect a persons worth, and then if those workers SAVED for the down payment, SAVED for the new car, etc we MIGHT not be in the fix we are in. Any other thoughts on this?
Suppose I have 2 vehicles-----a vehicle I drive a lot with good mileage and a gas guzzler I drive very little.
I had planned on trading the vehicle I drive a lot for a new car, however, it doesn't qualify for " cash for clunkers"
I then trade the vehicle I drive very little for the cash for clunkers .
The govt will then brag how much fuel is being saved by this trade,when the fact is it was very little as that gas guzzler never was driven much to start with.
The govt is assuming the clunkers being traded were driven the same # of miles as the new car being bought when they label their program a success.
Not necessarily !
This was exactly the situation of my son and his wife. They considered trading in his older truck that was driven very little (less than a mile to and from work), but decided against it since they still have 2 in college and didn't want to take on additional debt until both are out.
Cash for Clunkers is costing an estimated $20,000 per additional car sale. Spending $20,000 to subsidize car sales probably isn't fiscally smart, even by federal government standards.
BusinessWeek estimated that of the 250,000 Cash For Clunkers deals that happened over the 4 day period 200,000 of them would have been bought anyway at some point in the near future.
Essentially the Government paid $1,000,000 (billion) for an additional 50,000 in car sales, or a cost per additional sale of $20,000.
Read and weep:
Quote:
Edmunds.com (http://www.businessweek.com/autos/autobeat/archives/2009/07/www.edmunds.com - broken link), which is benefiting from all the extra site traffic generated by CARS nonetheless issued a report Monday saying that each car bought under the program would actually cost the U.S. tax-payer $20,000 per vehicle sold, not the $3.500-$4,500 actually paid out.
Edmunds figures that CARS will only help drive about 50,000 incremental new car sales. How is this possible? Edmunds.com’s research shows that typically 200,000 vehicles worth less than $4,500 are traded in for new vehicles every three months. At best the current Cash for Clunkers program will fund 250,000 such transactions in the same time period—a gain of only 50,000 vehicles, says the company. Given that this program is budgeted to cost $1,000,000,000, this increase will come at the cost of $20,000 per extra sale.
Anybody have an answer to this mess??? We are being taken over by "czars"!!! Things sounded great during the campaign, I know. But we need to wake up!! We don't want what we're headed for!!!!!
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