CASH FOR CLUNKERS QUOTES OF THE WEEK

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The wasteful idiocy of the CARS Act (a/k/a "The War Against RWD V8s") is prompting some emotional responses from gearheads. Here's one found over at Bangshift.com from "Packratdave" that was too good to remain buried in a message board:

In the last 20 years most cars I have owned/driven would have gone to the junkyard had I not saved them. I feel this is real recycling. My current driver/beater (98 Chevy) was on the truck for the yard when I bought it. Less that $400 in parts later it's a good runner. ...

While out at a local Chevy dealer yesterday, had to pass the line of recently killed car to leave. A nice looking mid 1990s GMC pick up, extended cab and all waiting to be crushed was there. Better truck that I can afford as a honest car mechanic with 2kids and a mortgage.

Last week it was a sweet looking 87 Cutlass coupe, hard to find now in the northeast, that is crushed by now. I would have even taken it with the wreaked engine, got a spare. I told my wife seeing those cars, for me would be like the humane society putting dogs that they were going to put down on the front lawn with a sign saying "we are going to kill these dogs and you can't help them." Just make me sick. My wife thinks I am kind of strange, but I bet you guys (and girls) would understand.

You can just feel the emotional torture in that post. Somehow, I'll bet the chumps who "cashed in" that vintage Cutlass have no guilt as they motor on in their wimpy FWD, partially paid for by a welfare voucher . . . .

[I wonder if Vandal-in-chief Barack Hussein Obama or "Gulfstream liberals" such as William Clay Ford, Jr. ["Li'l Billy"], Botox queen "San Fran Nan," "Dingy" Harry Reid, and the legislative "Dr. Mengle" of the Ca$h for Clunker$ bailout fiasco -- Rep. Betty Sutton -- care a whit about the pain and suffering that vandalizing and shredding hundreds of thousands of vintage vehicles causes to legions of automotive enthusiasts? You can be if we were chain-sawing old-growth forests, they'd understand . . . .]

And on the wasteful aspects of Cash for Clunkers, here's a brilliant blog entry over at "Hot Air.com" by Allahpundit that shouldn't be missed:http://hotair.com/archives/2009/08/01/just-a-reminder-cash-for-clunkers-requires-destroying-perfectly-usable-cars/

On a lighter note, here's some of what Truth With Speedzzter (TWS) has been saying in the Bangshift discussion lamenting C4C:

Quote from SpiderGearsMan: "Harvard is the most expensive school -therefore it is the best"

TWS: That's sort of like what the "gold chainers" in the Ferraris and Porsches say (just before you smoke 'em in some home-built primered "heap")


Quote from antmnte: "They should give us the 2 billion I bet we can find some cars to buy, call it cash for keepers.Maybe get another going for tires and call it cash for burnouts."

TWS: Cash for Burnouts! That's almost tempts me to go for some of this welfare . . . No! Got . . . to . . . stay . . . strong . . .

BONUS:

"With social media, you can be vapid, boring and annoying with alarming frequency," Patricia Vaccarino, owner of a Seattle public relations firm, warned clients in a newsletter.

Sounds like she's been reading "Truth With Speedzzter," eh, Li'l Billy? . . . .

NO CAMARO "FUNNYCAR" FOR NASCAR NATIONWIDE SERIES

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According to the Orlando Sentnel and Bangshift.com Chevrolet has told NASCAR that it will not submit its "iconic" Camaro for the horrendous "common-template" "FunnyCar of Tomorrow" treatment to race in the NASCAR Nationwide Series.

The New Bow-tie brigade doesn't want the already cartoonish Camaro to be further diluted and distorted into a "NASCAR" cartoon-car. "New GM" Racing's head honcho Mark Kent told the Orlando Sentnel's Steven Cole:

[W]e felt that by forcing the Camaro into the Nationwide templates that we were compromising the body lines of an iconic car. So at the end of the day we just could not get the Camaro in the Nationwide series to satisfy our requirements.

That's a laudable show of design integrity for "Government Motors."

[But does this mean that we'll never see a "Camaro" flopper in NHRA funny car competition?]

Too bad Ford didn't take the same stance in protecting the design integrity of its Mustang from the aesthetically-bankrupt butchers at NASCAR.

The hideous common-template "FunnyCar of Tomorrow" idea has destroyed what little was left of "Stock Car" racing.

Racing RWD "Pony Cars" in the Nationwide Series only really made sense if they were production-based.

However, sipping the COT Kool-Aid (tm), Mark Kent parroted the NASCAR talking point about "quest for very close competition" creating "the need to have templated bodies in that series." That's just wrong. It's amazing that production-based cars race competitively in series all over the world (even sometimes in the U.S.A.). And Mark Kent knows that. Perhaps he was just unwilling to acknowledge what millions of racing fans already know: that "the emperor has no clothes" when it comes to the weak justifications for NASCAR's spec-racer COT.

NASCAR lost the "groove" of what makes a stock car "stock" (and identifiable to the "Walter Mittys" in the stands) so long ago, it seems impossible for them to recover now.

Yet because of NASCAR's monopoly on racing venues through International Speedway Corporation (ISC), NASCAR's corporate sister, and the tight regulation of racing dates to non-ISC tracks, not to mention NASCAR's 800-lb gorilla dominance of the motorsports television market, it is virtually impossible to develop a viable competitor to NASCAR.

NASCAR's monopoly needs to be broken up under anti-trust laws and real production car racing returned to America's speedways.

Sadly, Chevrolet didn't completely tell "[t]he folks in the palace of pure thought down there in Daytona" to "step off." Instead, the GM Racing gang said they'd sticker-up their "NASCAR" with Impala decals.

They probably figure that few will object to faking up some FWD 'box into a cartoonish "COT."

However, Chevrolet's acquiescence to the COT concept merely delays the time when real, production-based stock car racing returns to America and the POX of the Common-template is eradicated.

But at least Chevrolet took an obvious "baby step" that Ford and Chrysler were seemingly too timid to take.

"OH WHAT A FEELING:” TOYOTA, NOT FORD, WINNING CASH FOR CLUNKERS WELFARE FEST

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As the U.S. Senate prepares to waste $2,000,000,000.00 more in freshly printed money borrowed from Communist China on the boondoggle known as Cash for Clunkers, it appears that Japan’s Toyota is making out like a bandit.

Early reports that the Ford Focus was the number one selling welfare poster-child for the “War on V8s” may have been incorrect. Now Toyota’s Corolla is the most popular car of choice for selfish looters who think our grandchildren ought to spot them an unearned $4,500.00 for a new car.

Four of the top five boring “transportation appliances” being purchased with CARS welfare-bailout funds are models sold by Japanese invaders. Three of the top five are from the “Evil Empire” (Toyota). (That ought to make “Rowdy” Kyle Busch and the “NASCAR Nation” ecstatic).

Ford has slumped to third in sales, behind the New GM and Toyota.

Surely this isn’t what “bailout” voucher-monger William Clay Ford, Jr. had in mind when he vigorously campaigned for the CARS Act.

On the other hand, considering FoMoCo’s pitiful performance last Monday at Pocono (a Toyota “FunnyCar of Tomorrow” won and not a single common-template “Ford” made the top 10), perhaps “Win on Monday, make welfare-subsidized sales on Tuesday” is the new rule of not-very-stock car racing.

The impotent Senate Republicans apparently got rolled on re-upping “C4C.” Although any amendment of the House version would have killed this welfare-bailout program until after the August recess (because the House couldn’t schedule a vote), the apparently clueless GOP leadership couldn’t engineer a “poison pill” amendment.

Or more likely, the Senate GOPers didn’t really want to. Redistributionist “money for nothing” schemes like the CARS Act are supposed to be against the GOP creed. But auto dealers historically have overwhelmingly supported Republicans. And big business lobby groups, such as the National Automobile Dealers Association and the Association of Automobile Manufacturers most certainly have been lobbying hard for TWO THOUSAND MILLION DOLLARS more bailout “cash on-the-hood.”

So the defanged Senate Republicans seemingly raised token opposition. A filibuster apparently wasn’t even threatened. Nor did they try for a deal with left-wing Democrats to reduce eligibility or increase the spread between the “clunker” m.p.g. and the replacement “appliance” m.p.g. Nor did they revisit the issue of whether a majority of the borrowed bailout money should be going offshore to Asian and European automakers. Any of these amendments would have stopped the bleeding of the treasury and put the brakes on "C4C."

Instead, the Senate GOP went through the motions and caved into the “reality” that the “votes were there” to balloon the deficit even further by funding more sodium silicate “murders” of potentially collectable V8-powered vehicles from the 1980s and 1990s. (The toothless GOP similarly caved on the nomination of uber-liberal activist Justice Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court)

Cash for clunkers has taken another step toward becoming another permanent middle-class entitlement program. The not-so-free market has taken another broadside. The longer the "C4C" virus hangs around, the worse its corrosive effects will become.

An additional FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND vintage vehicles will be vandalized and crushed as a result of the funding. Some estimate this could inflate used car prices in the sub-$4,500.00 strata by $300.00 to $800.00 per vehicle. On models hardest hit by “C4C,” future price increases may be even higher.

Moreover, borrowing money to “invest” in depreciating assets like imported automobiles – that sounds almost like the sort of “hedge fund” shenanigans that helped trigger the financial crisis in the first place. It's hardly an engine for creation of stable, long-term jobs. It's more like a "crack cocaine" stimulus (a quick "hit" followed by an inevitable hard crash and a craving for another "fix")

But what’s worse, is the entitlement mentality that is reinforced by these welfare vouchers. The current giveaway is merely priming the pump for the greeniac’s dream “C4C” program, which would not have as many limits and would imperil many more collector and donor vehicles. And "C4C" is likely the new "rebate:" a corrosive pricing gimmick that never really goes away once the door is opened to it.

And for all of this, we’ll spend a net $20,000.00 per additional vehicle sold, cannibalize future sales from a time when GM, Ford and Chrysler might have been better positioned to compete, stick our kids with billions in new debt, kickstart inflation in some sectors of the automobile markets, further drive down our abysmal savings rate, further populate our highways with more soulless FWD Japanese invader “appliances” (as we simultaneously loot and shred our recent automotive heritage), and teach yet another generation that welfare vouchers and federal handouts are the answer.

To borrow from an old “Evil Empire” advertising slogan – Oh, What a [Wonderful] Feeling.

FORD: OFFICIAL VEHICLE OF THE NHRA

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Ford can't buy a win in NHRA Pro Stock and because of Ford's legendary mismanagement during the 1970s (and now decade-long failure to effectively counter the emerging LS V8 threat) the NHRA staging lanes are mostly filled with GM vehicles, but Ford is now replacing Pontiac as the official vehicle of the National Hot Rod Association.

The phrase “Drive One” resonates much louder today in the corporate offices of NHRA as it was announced that the world’s largest motorsports sanctioning body has signed a multiyear agreement with Ford Motor Company, designating the legendary automaker as the official car and truck of NHRA.

NHRA will be transitioning all official vehicles to the renowned blue oval. As official car and truck of NHRA, Ford will provide support vehicles for NHRA trackside, including the NHRA Safety Safari presented by Automobile Club of Southern California, to allow them to perform their important trackside duties.

WHAT ARE THEY HIDING? OBAMAIANS STALL ON CASH FOR CLUNKERS DATA RELEASE

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According to the Associated Press, "The Obama administration is refusing to quickly release government records on its "cash-for-clunkers" rebate program. . . ."

What are they hiding?

Based on the scanty information that has been released "six of the top 10 vehicles purchased are Honda, Toyota and Hyundai."

How about that, Lil Billy? Our 1980s and 1990s automotive heritage is being pillaged for a hoard of forgettable Japanese invader "transportation appliances."

However, the Obama Administration's foot-dragging on the release of the electronic data received from the welfare/bailout-loving dealers means that "it's difficult to determine whether the administration is overselling the claim without seeing what's being sold, what's being traded in and where the cars are being sold."

How can the U.S. Senate responsibly approve any more money for this giveaway mess until the Obama Administration comes clean with the "transparency" they've repeatedly promised?

Instead, the National Automobile Dealers Association, the Association of Automobile Manufacturers and the "Gucci Gulch" lobbyists for other taxpayer money-grubbing leeches want the Senate to triple the waste without even a rudimentary accounting on the first wave of welfare/bailout money. Sounds like TARP, doesn't it?

CASH FOR CLUNKERS: THE "$800 TOILET SEAT" OF THE BAILOUT

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According to Avery Goodman, at Seeking Alpha, Edmunds.com has calculated that the $1,000,000,000.00 in borrowed money that the federal government has blown on the Ca$h for Clunker$ welfare/bailout program will yield a net increase in sales of between 22,000 and 86,000 units.

Remember, payout of welfare vouchers for vehicles that would have sold anyway does not yield any net benefit to sales. Thus, only sales that would not have occurred but for the bailout cash on-the-hood are the true measure of the program's effects.

In other words, the cost to the taxpayers for each one of those additional sales is between $45,354.00 to $11,628.00 per car!

Goodman posits that a $20,000.00 per additional unit sold (over what ordinarily would have been sold without the CARS welfare voucher) is a reliable estimate.

But, it's not clear that all of these sales increases are true increases (i.e. cars that would never have been bought but for the welfare voucher). Some of the sales are undoubtedly canabalized from future sales that would have occurred regardless.

The sales last month from the federal incentives may result in fewer buyers later this year after the program ends, George Pipas, Ford’s sales analyst, told CNBC today.

Thus, the cost-per-additional-sale could possibly be even higher.

Goodman concludes:

The "cash for clunkers" program is yet another boondoogle - an expensive waste of precious taxpayer dollars. Government spending should be reined in, in light of the multi-trillion dollar unsustainable deficits that this nation now faces. However, if we must increase government spending, the money would be better spent on infrastructure and education improvements that might help bring jobs back to America, and encourage long term growth, rather than cosmetic improvements to the short term earnings of makers of high mileage automobiles, many of which are foreign companies.

This government is, unfortunately, a reflection of the current state of economic immaturity that prevails in America. The vast majority of people, including most people in Congress, do not understand the forces that drive the real economy, and see only the short term view. That is how they get manipulated into allowing the Federal Reserve to behave like a slush fund for big banks, passing programs like TARP into law, and enacting programs like "cash for clunkers" which all abuse the taxpayers.

CASH FOR CLUNKERS: JUST THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG

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The frenzied "gold rush" for borrowed welfare money better known as "Ca$h for Clunker$" has temporarily abated as the greedy looter-vandals await the "mack daddies" in the U.S. Senate to print and spend billions more.

The "halftime" pause has allowed time for a host of sickening viral videos on how government suckling dealers vandalize perfectly good engines (mostly V8s) to qualify for their CARS welfare checks. Some engines have fought destruction for as long as 45 minutes. As one technician destroying a Ford Bronco engine says as he watches the sickening sight "What a waste! What a Waste!"
These videos have captured the attention of talk radio and cable news.

This is causing an emerging backlash against the CARS program. Here as some examples:

What a bunch of fraud, waste, and abuse on all levels up to Obama. Stupid program, and these clowns featured in this video are the monkey wrenchers that fix peoples cars that are unable to themselves. There ain't no freakin' difference between neutral and park for revving it up you dork. Except maybe it could roll over you as you try to kill it. Built Ford Tough Bronco windsor holdin' strong to the very end...

What a waste. Good vehicles being self-destructed from within. They can take this "clunker" program and... Well you get the idea.

This is the Automobile Holocaust... what it means to you is higher taxes in the years to come.

One Autoblog reader, BoxerFanatic, however, saw the larger truth in the Cash For Clunkers bailout:

[O]nce everybody who has a clunker, and wants a Focus, already have them... the artificial demand will CRASH.

Tech bubble. Housing bubble, cash/stock market bubble (remember 14,000?), and now automotive bubble. Every time demand is artificially spiked, it crashes to compensate.

Good, viable cars are still being destroyed and sent to China, rather than being utilized to their fullest extent.

The government is still leveraging this with future borrowed money, because they are already broke.

Government is still printing money, monetizing [its] own debt, borrowing from China, and will need to raise taxes.

Tax revenue stats just came out... the LOWEST adjusted decline in tax revenue since the great depression... (I hate that they call seizure "revenue", as if the government earns anything... they TAKE money away from people who earn it. WELL beyond what the Constitution limits the government to do.)

the government is spending money faster than ever, and tax money into the government is dropping to historic lows... and debt and deficits are at astronomical, soon to be unrecoverable highs...

Gee, what could be wrong with that...

It used to be Gub'ment cheese. Now it's Gub'ment cars. It is re-distribution, and waste of private wealth either way, and it is not acceptable.

How about if Ford wants to sell the cars, how about they sell their cars on merit, rather than on welfare assistance.

Truth With Speedzzter couldn't have said it better. CASH FOR CLUNKERS IS JUST THE "TIP OF THE ICEBERG" ON WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS COUNTRY!

Ford, of course, is benefitting the most among the Detroit 3 from the Cash for Clunkers bailout. However MORE THAN 50 PERCENT OF THE CARS WELFARE VOUCHERS ARE GOING FOR THE SUBSIDIZED PURCHASE OF FOREIGN BRANDED VEHICLES. (JUST AS TRUTH WITH SPEEDZZTER PREDICTED)

The Automotive Aftermarket Industry Association was also among those predicting a backlash against the CARS welfare plan:

"It wouldn't surprise me if there is a consumer backlash once car owners realize that 'Cash for Clunkers' is nothing more than a clever slogan for a program to spend $1 billion of our tax dollars to fund a government subsidized vehicle trade-in to help new car dealers sell cars," said Kathleen Schmatz, AAIA president and CEO. "Consumers will soon learn that they are simply trading in their vehicle and will still have to jump through all of the hoops to qualify for and purchase a new vehicle."

The much heralded fuel efficiency and environmental benefits of purchasing a new vehicle could easily be achieved through better maintenance of an existing vehicle or trading up to a newer used vehicle, according to AAIA. Any savings from improved miles per gallon will be lost from the costs involved in destroying and disposing of the "clunkers."

AAIA has strongly opposed "Cash for Clunkers" that prematurely destroys vehicles and their valuable parts and components. "Destroying vehicles with many more years of life denies consumers more affordable used vehicles and pulls vehicles from the aftermarket supply chain," said Schmatz.

The Consumer Allowance Rebate System, the [Orwellian newspeak] official name for "Cash for Clunkers," offers vouchers up to $4,500 to new car dealerships for consumers who trade-in their vehicle for a new, more fuel-efficient vehicle.

I wonder what Ford's VANDAL-IN-CHIEF, William Clay Ford, Jr. ("Li'l Billy") thinks of when he hears another potentially collectable Ford V8 is being wasted with a sodium silicate solution? Is all that he can hear the cash register ringing up another taxpayer funded "bailout" sale?

Cash for Clunkers needs to die . . . now! Urge your Senator to vote against additional funding for destroying V8s and European vehicles from the 1980s and 1990s.