Are you kidding? We need a billion percent tax on cheesecake and other desserts to keep the BMIs down, so that we can save money on the UHC side. Of course we will need million dollar WIC checks because why should only the millionaires have cheesecake?
Because any spending - public or private - also generates subsequent economic transactions.
Otherwise - why don’t we just jack up the tax rate to 100% and let government be 100% of our GDP? Then with the magical government multiplier effect, our economy will grow by 50-70% instantly!
If this is such an unambiguous success, why don’t we write a law saying all cars more than 6 months old are ordered to be destroyed, but we give everyone $10,000 towards buying a new one. Think of the massive amount of car sales! Our economy will be absolutely booming!
They didn’t properly forecast the demand or anything close to it - and they weren’t ready to actually handle what they got. So dealerships are sitting uncompensated and facing financial turmoil, our bureaucratic system is stressed because the whole thing is a mess, there are technicalities that may prevent people who made these deals in good faith get screwed, etc.
So even if you accept that C4C is a good idea in concept, you can still admit the execution sucks.
As I see it, if one were to lay out some measurements of success for this particular program, I would think it was aimed to:
- Stimulate demand for new cars.
- Remove older, inefficient cars from the market.
- Make sure that everyone got a square deal.
Others have mentioned reasons why the program is no good. But is “running through November 1” an important and useful measurement of success? As in, is there a reason why the program fails to achieve some goal if it doesn’t sell the same number of cars over a longer time period?
I also don’t think a key attribute of success is whether there were difficulties with the website or paperwork. Seriously, who the hell cares, if everyone in the end gets the deal the government promised them? If you have some evidence that dealers are actually getting stuck with clunkers that the government refuses pay for, cough it up.
Lastly, we will know pretty soon what kind of cars people are buying to replace their clunkers. We know for a fact that eligibility requirements mandate a significant (though not maximum) improvement in fuel economy. In the next weeks, the government is supposed to start releasing data as to whether people were trading in pickups for somewhat more efficient models, or trading in trashed out gas guzzling 12 mpg yachtmobiles for Priuses. I anxiously await this information.
Because silly, the stimulus part of is only necessary when the economy is under capacity. If businesses are making 75% normal income they will cut 25% of jobs and eventually capacity (factories and whatnot). This is to stop that hemorrhaging.
See previous statement. Also, this is voluntary. The whole point is to nudge people who have the money for new cars, but are too scared to spend it.
They’re responding to fix that. The expectations of this were probably based on the worst case scenario. Would you rather they put 10 billion into the plan and have it sit there unused? They can shift more money into it if it’s necessary… and they are.
Only if you’re hypercritical.
You could justify this with all sorts of boneheaded moves. Replace all the perfectly good cars in government fleets. Give an indiscriminate subsidy to new car purchases. Buy people shiny new cars with tax money. Stimulation to a particular industry with government money isn’t inherently good - in fact it’s usually inherently bad, an excuse for the powerful to use their influence to rob the public treasury.
IOW, turning perfectly usable pieces of machinery into junk. This argument sort of falls flat with the joke requirements attached to the program. Replace your 2001 pickup with 18 MPG with a brand new 2009 19 mpg pickup with free taxpayer money? Sure!
“Inefficient” - what’s your concern here? We’re hurting the environment more by junking functional machinery before it’s necesary - the process of building the new cars is usually more environmentally damaging than the minor differences between an 18 and 22 mpg car over a few years.
But that’s not happening if dealers aren’t getting reimbursed in a timely fashion, or if confusing rules or paperwork prevents rebates.
The program costs at least 3x what it was intended to - if you think it’s an efficient use of tax money, I suppose you may not think that’s so bad - but if you think it’s a badly conceived clusterfuck, we just tripled the budget.
I’m sure the dealers that haven’t receiver their money yet care. I’m sure the people who aren’t sure if their vehicles qualify or not care.
To make the comparison in the OP, who cares if the government isn’t sure for a few weeks whether or not the appendectomy a patient needs is covered? The government will get it right eventually.
Obviously the latter case is far more serious and time-sensitive - however, if the government can’t manage this simple program right, how does it bode for their ability to set up a far more complex system?
If more people did the latter, it would only be by coincidence. There’s no requirement in the program that a significant increase in fuel efficiency is needed.
This sort of reminds me of ethanol subsidies - essentially, the rich and powerful are using their influence with congressmen to give money from the public treasury to their industries - and while it’s sold as environmentally friendly, it actually is damaging to the environment.
It’s weird to me that the left leaning folks here are so suspicious of the rich, and yet these programs designed to funnel money from the public treasury into powerful corporations are praised.
Oh, come on - really? You have to be hypercritical to find the flaws here?
Even if you are 100% gung ho behind the concept of C4C, shouldn’t you be pissed off that the auto lobby was able to take the teeth out of programs so that you don’t need a significant improvement in efficiency, just a tiny one?
Don’t you think the government could’ve set consistent, easy to understand rules so that potential buyers and sellers could understand whether or not the old and new cars would qualify under the program?
Could they have projected the demand enough that their computer systems would be capable of handling it?
Could they have planned better so that payments could’ve gotten out promptly instead of being backlogged for weeks, with the dealer being denied much-needed money for substantial periods of time?
You need to be hypercritical for these things to seem like flaws?
Auto Companies rich and powerful corporations? Not in this decade. They are being helped to keep them from going under and laying off a few hundred thousand more workers.
GM is still worth tens of billions of dollars. It is most certainly a BIG EEEEVIL CORPORATION even if it’s failing due to its own incompetance. What, corporations aren’t evil anymore if their management sucks and they’re not profitable?
Seriously, Gonzo - your whole sctick on this board is “the evil rich are raping you in the asshole!” - and here you are defending the idea that the government should be giving billions of dollars to huge corporations.
I prefer my stimulus concept which is to give every new car buyer a shiny new nickel. They don’t even have to trade in their old car! People will be so overwhelmed by the idea of getting completely free money that they’ll be lining up to get their nickels, and it will hardly cost the government anything.
Considering that your alternatives are proposed in bad faith (with the exception of the replacement of government fleets, which was to a modest degree included in the stimulus bill), why should anyone respond to arguments that you know nobody supports?
Either you are unfamiliar with the program or you are making this argument in bad faith.
If you are not being snarky about this point, in that environmental impact should be balanced with the loss of American jobs, I’m curious how you would view more stringent environmental regulations that make it more difficult for manufacturers to produce large, wasteful SUVs.
I believe the current issue is that the government has to account for how many cars have been traded in already, and has issued guarantees to car dealers that their clunkers will be compensated. It appears as though that will be sorted out within a matter of days. Can you show some sort of pattern of the government telling dealers, “Even though you took a car eligible for the clunker subsidy, we refuse to pay you”?
This is a stupid point. The program was designed to last until all the funds were expended or November 1, whichever came first. The program is not costing 3 times more than it was intended to, it was expanded three times in scope.
Like Medicare? Social Security? The US Army? The Veterans Health Administration? The Tennessee Valley Authority? NASA?
Just because an entity screwed one thing up doesn’t mean that it cannot accomplish something else. If we applied such a standard to you, anyone else, any business, any charity, any government in the world, then the results would be absurd. “Ravenman failed to fix a leaky toilet in his house – how can we trust him with driving a CAR!!!”
Again, either you are not familiar with the program or you are being facetious. I really can’t tell which.
By this measure, the iPhone is a failure because it was difficult to register the phones online shortly after they were released.
Yep, the iPhone: big, huge, disastrous failure. If we can’t trust Apple with the iPhone, how can we trust it with the new Shuffle?
It did exceed their wildest dreams. I once ran a workshop that was so much more successful than planned that we had to turn people away. Everyone called it a success, not a flop - perhaps they were all fools.
Right, the car buyers who had been absent for months had all planned, by an amazing coincidence, to start buying just when the program kicked in.:rolleyes:
So, you don’t trust Americans to make good car buying choices? You maybe want to send the jack-booted thugs to the dealerships to force people to buy hybrids? The report I heard on the radio said that high MPG cars were the most popular. It will be interesting to see if they track the average MPG increase from the program.
I’m in the same position. Tough on us. With limited money, you try to get the most bang. Are you proposing to increase the program to $5 billion or something to include us? Detroit would be thrilled, no doubt.
It will be $3 billion because of demand, and because of the impact on stimulus. The money, as I’ve seen it proposed, is not coming from new funding but from moving other stimulus money into this program. Are you against using that money for something that works now as opposed to something that might or might not work later?
It’s fascinating how people will abandon their conservative principles to attack a government program that has the audacity to work. I’ve seen a request for increased complication with more paperwork (Sam saying we should force the clunkers to replace worse clunkers) and you want to limit choice and/or spend more.
Government succeeding really makes your heads explode, doesn’t it?
No, you have to be hypercritical to be upset about them. 
Efficiency is a secondary concern. The fact that it’s helping while *massively *stimulating the economy and helping our car industry is a fantastic side effect.
If you can’t understand the rules, you should take a deep breath and read them again. They aren’t particularly arcane.
They’re fixing it. Like I say, it surprised them how well it worked. I hope you never have the horror of owning a business and being overwhelmed beyond your expectations. :dubious:
Can I get a cite please?
The fact that people wanted to buy new cars and were held back by recession based fear is what is important here. This means that with a nudge, their confidence is returning. That’s awesome.
You need to be hypercritical to be mad as hell and not want to take it any more.
Update from the parallel universe:
“Well, look at that, the Cash for Clunkers program is a total flop, the money isn’t going anywhere, not being spent, no cars being moved, so that proves that government can’t do anything right! We could have used the money to pay off our tab with Haliburton and Blackwater, but nooooooo…!”
Hell, Madison and Hamilton never once mentioned automobiles in The Federalist Papers, so it must be unconstitutional.
And restaurants who give away pie to get people to buy dinner are stupid, right? Same as car companies who give rebates? A critique of the program which neglects the minor detail that no one gets money, they just spend a bit less on a major purchase is the most dumbass lame brained critique yet - pitiful even for Republicans. Right down there at Mallard Fillmore level, in fact.
Actually, the data is out sooner than I expected. Link.
I’d love to quote more, especially the statement of the CEO of an auto retailer chain on people trading in trucks for compacts, but you can read the article yourself.
I’m glad to see that you are finally coming around…
Oh, you were joking:D
Anyways, you keep defining this as a “success” because a massive number of people turned out to get free money. So many so that the government has to print up $2 billion more of free money to keep the program afloat.
And I pointed out the many flaws in the system, how people can get free money and still be driving a less fuel efficient vehicle than what I currently drive, and you take that to mean that I think that they should print even more free money or force more choices on consumers.I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying that to point out how ludicrous this program is.
What is going to happen next year when a lot of poor people can’t afford a car because all of the cheap ones that they could afford are crushed into little cubes? Another wildly successful government batch of free money being printed?
Nothing was in bad faith. My point was that you cannot simply declare “it boosted demand!” as the criteria for success of a program. There are lots of ultimately counterproductive things we can do that’ll boost demand in particular industries.
I may be unfamiliar with the program, but I’m not arguing in bad faith.
My statement is based on Sam Stone’s post here.
He’s usually well researched, so I took him at his word that this is true. Is it not?
He made the statement that it removes “inefficient” old cars. The issue of jobs is not related to efficiency. Since this measure is being (perhaps erroneously) sold on the idea of being environmentally friendly, certainly it’s a point worth raising, right?
If efficiency was really the goal here, then there would be some mandated percentage improvement in fuel economy.
No, I can’t show you that - the whole system is so gunked up that people aren’t sure who’s going to be paid out at this point, so there hasn’t yet been an opportunity for denials for reimbursement based on technicalities.
If it was sold as “this program will only cost a billion dollars” and instead they decide to spend 3 billion dollars on it then it’s either a sign of government incompetant at improperly projecting demand, or a way for them to sell a big program by pretending it’s a relatively smaller one at first.
I didn’t say government could not run a successful program. The OP asked if the clusterfuck involved in this program is a sign of general institutional incompetance that could be projected to socialized health care. It’s a valid concern.
Fixing a leaky toilet has no real relationship to driving a car. However, a program that handles the logistics of distributing public funds under certain circumstances does have some similarities to a public health care option. If the government can’t manage this much smaller, less complex issue properly, it’s not a good sign for their ability to tackle something larger.
See above. I’m willing to be corrected. Was Sam Stone incorrect in his description of the program?
Which post in this thread has anything remotely in common with any part of that?
First, I am not a Republican.
Secondly - I don’t even understand your point. This isn’t an issue of a seller offering incentives and/or take a loss on one product in order to boost their overall business. It’s the issue of the government providing a subsidy to those purchasing a certain product.
Someone gets the money - to what degree the buyer or seller benefits is debatable. From the buyer’s perspective, they have the government foot $4500 that they otherwise would have had to, if they had decided to buy a car anyway, and from the seller’s perspective - more people will buy their product because the cost is effectively less to the consumer, and so they generate more sales at the cost of the public treasury.
Quite frankly, I don’t understand your criticism. Either I don’t understand you or you aren’t understanding me.