Thursday, October 29, 2009

Governmental Incompetence: Cash for Clunkers

I can understand sticking by your ideological guns and all, but I don't understand anyone defending the cash for clunkers program.

Everyone can recall that when it was first rolled out, it ran out of money much faster than Congress predicted. Then American car makers didn't receive the brunt of the spending (though with Toyota's being made in San Antonio and Ford being made in Mexico, that may be a moot point). And, then there were the dealerships that "sold" the cars but didn't get paid by the government like promised and were put into financial dire straits of sorts and STILL haven't been paid months later.

And now, news is emerging that, despite the astronomical number being claimed on the government run website Cars.gov of 700,000 cars being sold due to the program, it probably instigated more like 125,000 sales (that's a 560% overstatement), not to mention that for each of those stimulus-y purchases, it cost we the American tax payer $24,000 for each car - that's over 5 times the max $4,500 government rebates.

So, the government spends 3 Billion dollars so that 125,000 new cars can be sold, claims it's a whopping success despite its terrible execution which lead to the program being scrapped, then totally, purposefully, misrepresents the numbers on their .gov website.

This coming on the heels of what I posted to as "bad" earlier, i.e. the news that the number of jobs created or saved by the stimulus was actually overstated by several thousand.

These are the people who refer to a bankrupt program, medicare, as an indicator of success. And now they want to run healthcare? My God...the incompetence of politicians is unbelievable

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