Gibbs to the Public: Go Buy a Car

I wish they had realized that $3.5k is too generous and trimmed the incentive for the second go around. Big ticket purchases like cars always have a big surge in demand as a recession lets up; we could get more clunkers off the road if the incentive were only $2.5k and it would probably still fully sell out.

Here is the “teachable moment” for Obama: Give people incentives (like tax cuts and subsidies) to make investments in their economy and they will. This is a superior approach to RAISING taxes and/or borrowing and expecting the government to make the correct decisions on our behalf with that money. Witness the Stimulus Bill.
Reduce taxes on the behavior you want to encourage…increase taxes on the behavior you want to discourage. This is pretty rudimentary economics.

So, $50 million on administration of the incentive program… and there are issues with the processing? Good golly! And these are the people we want running our health care?

No thanks Gibbs. I can’t and should not take on debt I can’t afford.

I hope it doesn’t end up like the propane mess in Arizona years ago. By the time they caught up with its implementation, it cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars they were not prepared to pay. But then again, they couldn’t print their own money, so I guess K4K will survive.

Bravo Mike in Costa Mesa…there are people who think in Southern Cali still. We need the rest of Cal to understand this and make other states see this. Look at our health care and the demand vs. supply and pls, include the ILLEGAL ALIENS into it.

Sounds like the program is a huge success. Heavy subscribership from the public, new car sales, increased economic activity, reduced gas consumption, old vehicles coming off the road . . .and so on.

Foghorn . ..
“We are broke so let’s go shopping.”
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Not everybody’s broke . .. The wealthiest 1 percent have never had it so good.
According to government figures, 1-percenters’ share of America’s total income is the highest it’s been since 1929, and their tax rates are the lowest they’ve faced in two decades.

Mike,
Your figures don’t refute danita’s point that tax rates are lower (notice she says individual rate and not the total contribution of that bracket). The change in total tax burden for that 1% can be seen as a result of their accumulating an increasingly greater percentage of our overall wealth.

I’m waiting for some of the buyers to realize that they can’t afford the car payments and excessive car insurance prices in today’s economic climate and lose their new auto.

missed point, My son will be attending middle school this year. While reading their website today I learned 7,000 teachers will be laid off this year. 7,000! I guess NC didn’t get any stimulas.

This is earily similar to Bush saying “Go shopping” that garnered so much criticism from the left.
Wheres the left heckling and cackling at Gibbs?
Funny how giddy people get over tax payer money going out like free candy to would be car buyers. How fantastic!
Next they will be handing out free cartons of cigs to homeless people to go vote… oh wait…

“This is earily similar to Bush saying “Go shopping” that garnered so much criticism from the left.”
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Similar, but not the same. This particular program serves a few different functions, one of which is to encourage people toward vehicles that consume less oil and pollute less – future thinking. In other words, this isn’t just ‘spend money on anything!’ – this is about spending money on something smart and beneficial.

“And I bought a car some time ago that gets 35 miles a gallon. And it’s not a Pious. Where’s MY money?”
“an 8-mile stretch I’ll have to drive during “construction” and lane closures”
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There are people struggling to make ends meet and you’re whining about this?

I think Mr. Obama and his team are getting out of touch with the “Yes We Can” crowd, the crowd who has lost their cars, their homes and their pride.

—“There is absolute frustration across the board,” Alex Kurkin, a lawyer based in Miami who represents several car dealerships, tells The Lede today. “As of this morning, they’re not really confident about any deals, and no one can give them advice about what they should be telling their customers.”
One thing still not clear is how many older cars have actually been sold and scrapped with the original $1 billion, and how many more the new $2 billion will be able to cover. Mr. Kurkin tells us that the government Web site where dealers are supposed to register their deals has been crashing, and the dealers haven’t been able to plug in their information.—
Yes, you Socialist Obama drones–Cash-for-Clunkers is an absolute disaster! Whenever government starts messing with private markets, they screw it up.
Wait until we get ObamaCare!

Posted by: danita | Jul 31, 2009 11:17:12 PM
Thank you for inventing totally unsubstantiated numbers–the way Obama does every day.
How many jobs did you “save” today?

Don’t you take Mr. Obama’s number as his words. It’s like hearing him say with his stammering voice that if we save 1 cent a day, in a year we will have 365 cents. 3.65 dollars saved may not seemed like a lot, but if saved over an average of a person’s lifetime, say 75 years, it will be 273.75 dollars. Now that may not means much, he would continue, but it put a smile on a kid in a crowded neighborhood with a candy in his hands. Not only that, if saved over the earth’s lifetime, a generation of one family will save trillions.

“Kicking Tires, meanwhile, looks back on the numbers so far and declares the Cash for Clunkers experiment a success.”
What happens if people get this new car and drive an extra 10,000 miles a year than they would have if they still had their clunker? And now they have a car payment and a higher insurance payment and more maintenance costs and they struggle to make their car payment and they probably would have bought the car anyway 6 months from now anyway and so we all had to chip in with our taxes, and there are 250,000 less used cars on the market for people who can’t afford a new car and so the prices of used cars go up because of the lower supply and will this really make a difference when China pollutes the earth more in one day than we do in a year and why are we still going to import cars from China when they refuse to curb their pollution?

Silly me, not being American, I understood the phrase, ”Cash for Clunkers” to be more money for Congressmen & their ”friends” – part of the pork-ridden stimulus program.
Having read the article, I have to say that this program is totally wrong-headed, as are all subsidies or economic policies that interfere with normal market forces & influence decision making by individuals or corporations.

Run out of money? No problem. We’ll just get more. I believe Margaret Thatcher once said that the problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money. Where is all this money coming from for the cash for clunkers grift? Other people’s money, that’s where, or more commonly known as your tax dollars.

Missed point, Okay here we go,
From RSS’s financial office:
The House has proposed to cut 7,000 teaching positions state-wide by increasing the funding for teachers by 2 students in each grade level. RSSS would have 84 teaching positions less then we currently have.
Funding teacher assistants based on the student membership in k-2 instead of k-3 would result in the loss of 5,000 classroom teacher assistants state-wide. This 25% reduction would mean the elimination of 75 teacher assistant positions in RSSS.
There would be an increase in the Assistant Principal allotment leading to the loss of 4 assistant principal position and a cut to Instructional Support Positions that would eliminate 7 guidance counselors, social workers, intervention specialists, attendance counselors, media specialists, nurses or curriculum coaches. The state would eliminate the 3 Middle School Literacy Coaches that have been provided to RSSS the last couple of years.
Inproving Student Accountability funds have been removed from all budget scenarios presented to date. This eliminates the grade 3-5 reading assistant positions that are assigned to each elementary school.
Both centeral office administration and non-instructional support allotments (clerical staff, custodians and substitute teacher pay) would receive 5% reductions of $107,641 $76,032 and $3335,972 respectively totaling approximately 18.5 positions.
In addition to the 211 employee positions that would be eliminated next year, there would be a 90% 70% reduction in school technology funding leaving slightly more the $14,000 to address the technology needs associated with education and supporting a student population of 20,650.
Other drastic cuts include the elimination of all staff development funding for the next 2 years, a 11.6% reduction to the More at Four preschool program, reducing mentor pay funding by 50% along with reductions to At-Risk funding of $900,000(there are multiple staff positions out of our At-Risk funding)and transportation funding of $450,000.
The redirection of funds intended to support the Public School Building Capital Fund would mean the loss of $1 million in funds that RSSS uses to support facility needs.
They are also considering pay reductions at this point.

“Didn’t we just do this with houses a couple of years back? Didn’t some trouble ensue?”
At least they didn’t burn down the houses — yet — as they’re doing with the cars.
This is THE stupidest move imaginable — especially the ecological cost of “crushing” the trade-in cars. (How many of the turned in cars are being diverted — “illegally” — to resale?)
As with most of this administration’s “success” stories, within a couple of months it’ll look waaay different — except that dealers will indeed have sold many new cars to people who can’t really afford them.

uh..uh… well…uh….I’ll get back to you on that
very soon we will have a cash for seniors program…and shredders and gas chambers will be waiting to receive their “guest”.. This will greatly help Obama shore up the SS and medicare rolls

“very soon we will have a cash for seniors program … This will greatly help Obama shore up the SS and medicare rolls.”
The sooner The One can thin the herd of its WarBabys and Boomers — the well-educated and socially-active generations against whose concernm He railed during the primaries — the sooner His corporate compadres can COMPLETELY rule the roost in the marketplace of ideas, and EVERYbody can live on the golf course.

“The sooner The One can thin the herd of its WarBabys and Boomers”
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Sounds a touch paranoid.

“Similar, but not the same. This particular program serves a few different functions, one of which is to encourage people toward vehicles that consume less oil and pollute less – future thinking. In other words, this isn’t just ‘spend money on anything!’ – this is about spending money on something smart and beneficial.”
Danita, the EPA just flipped out because the restrictions for the cars were not addressing the type of fuel economy required. See the dirty little secret is that new technologies have made cars more efficient without government intervention. Almost all cars out there exceed (by far) the fuel efficiency limits and they did it on their own. Even high horsepower vehicles on highway conditions and driven with fuel economy in mind can get very good mileage.
So now that they are changing the rules and beginning to screw people over, now it only goes towards certain cars. This will cause the most saturated market, the economic sedan, to boost sales, the cars that companies make the least profit on, because of market saturation. There is a reason GM’s biggest profit cars are SUV’s and sports cars/sedans, because its not saturated. Also, these economic sedans have higher depreciation because of the market saturation.
In any case it is all moot. It’s targetted. You talked about benefits, who benefits? List it out.
Auto manufacturers.
Auto Unions.
Hmmm… are these entities at all tied to this administration? Of course they are.
We need the entire economy to recover, not just a tiny segment. It amazes me how people will jump up and down screaming the economy is saved over this. It’s infantile mental gymnastics.
It is also unsustainable and will have a backlash. Lots of auto sales now, means less when the money is gone. It will even out by Christmas and auto sales will plummet.
And as far as the environment, I’m not going to go there. I have seen nothing that leads me to believe that the air we exhale, the air plants require to grow, the air that makes up less than 1% of the greenhouse effect, is harmful to the environment. Saving fuel? Sure, go for it. If thats the car you want to buy, have at it. Just keep in mind we are one country, for every gallon we save, countries like India and China are consuming 3 gallons more. They have (roughly) an astonishing 7-15% energy growth rate per year, compared to our 1-2%. With their mass population, “future” thinkers would be thinking of ways to get them to be half as economical and clean as we are.

So, what happened to this being a temporary stimulus measure? This was a simple enough calculation. $1bn given out in $3,500 or $4,500 increments. That works out to 11 or 12 cars per dealer. If Congress wanted more, they should appropriated it at the time.
We can’t afford to be issuing debt in order to give Americans money to send their cars to the scrap heap.

“It’s very disturbing seeing workable cars destroyed when they could benefit out of work people or people that can’t afford a new car.”
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The point is to get gas guzzlers off the road through financial encouragement – not to simply have the same gas guzzlers driven by different people.

“It’s very disturbing seeing workable cars destroyed when they could benefit out of work people or people that can’t afford a new car.”
Not to worry. Some of those Escalades and whatever will somehow find their way out of the scrap line. It’ll be a shocking unforseen scandal. Wait and see.

‘…Michael Gerrard, director of Columbia Law School’s Center for Climate Change Law, said …” What? Columbia has something called a Center for Climate Change Law? Does anyone else find that disturbing? Do they also have a Center for Earthquake Law or a Center for Volcanic Activity Law? They make as much sense.

Public to Gibbs….go get a job!

The entire tone of the recent Obama administration’s steps have been a direct message to all industry that the future is in technologies that use less fuel and create less pollution. Every major industry is coming on side and now moves forward with that in mind. A sea change has occurred – we’re designing a better future.

It is payback for the Union vote for Obama and his Democrat comrades,pure and simple.What an idea,give away money that you don’t have to save Union jobs.

Once, I sat on an airplane with an AlGorekian. He had just been to some earth summit and was young and full of the “green” Word.
A business man sitting nearby heard our conversation and chimed in that he had just bought a Prius. The young man was not as impressed as the new Prius owner had thought he’d be.
If your old car was well maintained, Green-boy said, it’s better for the earth not to buy something to replace it with. It is a waste of money, ebergy and resources to do so, he said. He himself drove a twelve year old Toyota. He believe it was better for the earth to use what we already have.
Why have a program that destroys perfectly good cars? Wouldn’t it be better to maintain them that trash them?
I thought people laughed at George Bush when he told the American people to keep spending money after the World Trade Towers fell? Isn’t this in the same vein?
Last thought, if vouchers work for getting people to buy cars, why are vouchers off the table for education and health insurance?

“-> Blaming Bush — with whom Oblabla has claimed to have few differences — is really wearing a little thin.”
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“Blaming Bush” is only wearing thin for Republicans – most americans have not forgotten the nightmare of the past 8 years . .. . and the nightmare the country was left in economically . .. and are more than happy to see Bush, Cheney, Rove and there suspect company gone.

P.S. – when does Scooter Libby get out of jail? Wasn’t he Cheney’s right-hand man?
“-> Blaming Bush — with whom Oblabla has claimed to have few differences — is really wearing a little thin.”
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“Blaming Bush” is only wearing thin for Republicans – most americans have not forgotten the nightmare of the past 8 years . .. . and the nightmare the country was left in economically . .. and are more than happy to see Bush, Cheney, Rove and there suspect company gone.

Indy . …
No, you missed the point. Scooter Libby was Cheney’s Chief of Staff. He’s in jail. One count of obstruction of justice; two counts of perjury; and one count of making false statements to federal investigators
A good solid Republican criminal.

Scooter Libby – Chief of Staff to the Vice-President of the United States in jail for perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements to federal investigators.
Good honest Republican government at the highest levels.

Indy . …
All of your information pales in comparison to a Chief of Staff to the Vice-President of the United States being convicted and jailed for perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements to federal investigators.
Here we have a person committing crimes at the highest level of good honest Republican government.
Surprised you can’t see the huge difference. Your vague facts are an attempt to smear – the other is proved criminality in the office of Cheney.

The longer Obama is president, with all his thieves, tax dodgers, thugs and liars….the better he makes Bush and Cheney look. By the time we get this big eared rat out of office, Bush will be looking like one of the greatest
presidents in recent history. Every lie Oblah-blah tells, every campaign promise he breaks, every stupid thing out of his mouth, that he has to later
have a beer summit, mmakes him look more stupid all the time. You liberals miss Bush and Cheney too. You are just too stupid to admit it!! What? Obama
worse than Bush…yeah thats right!!!!

Badboy . ..
“The longer Obama is president, with all his thieves, tax dodgers, thugs and liars….the better he makes Bush and Cheney look.”
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All you’ve got is some name calling against the Democrats, on the other hand Republicans have Scooter Libby, their Chief of Staff to the Vice-President of the United States being convicted and jailed for perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements to federal investigators.
Here we have a person committing crimes at the highest level of the Republican government.
How many more?
We’re all waiting to see who is convicted next – Cheney? Gonzales? Rove? All of their actions are currently being scrutinized.
There is no comparison, my dear, no comparison whatsoever.

“Tony Rezko’s trial is still posponed indefinitely…”
If they put if off LONG enough, maybe he can be tried WITH Obama . . .

“It’s hard for me to understand why conservatives would be opposed to giving money back to the public. Usually they stand for this sort of thing.”
Most are for it, but not for specific industry. Most conservatives prefer that the people spend it on what they need in their life, via taxes coming back to them.
Since this targetted one industry, who benefited?
Auto manufacturers.
Auto Union Workers.
Do either of these have a tie to the administration? Yes.
Thus, most conservatives find this unacceptable. What if a family could use that to pay off medical debt? Or could use it to help put their kid in College? Conservatives prefer the people choose what is done with their money, not the government.

danita said “the nightmare the country was left in economically ” Which had its roots in democrats who wouldn’t believe that FNMA & Freddie were in trouble when President Bush tried to tell them.