CASH FOR CLUNKERS NOT EXACTLY A BARGAIN: “Getting low-mpg vehicles off the road in favor of ones that are more fuel efficient is a good idea, but a new report by UC Davis says that the cost to reduce CO2 via C.A.R.S. is about ten times as high as it would be to lower them using carbon credits.” On the other hand, carbon credits have their own problems.

KENNETH ANDERSON: Is Cash for Clunkers Really Win-Win, as Representative Carnahan Says? “But it does seem to me that not only don’t I get a cash benefit that other people get as a reward for what, on the Congress’s apparent view of things, are their anti-social buying habits – I’m going to pay a higher price for the new car than I otherwise would.”

BOOST: Hybrid sales rose in July thanks to new Prius, Cash for Clunkers.

DANA LOESCH: Russ Carnahan Rattled at Cash for Clunkers Presser. Pics and video at the link.

“CASH FOR CLUNKERS” PROTESTERS forced out at Carnahan speech. “The White House said today that they’re not worried about the protesters. …They’re so not worried that they’re locking them outside.”

Plus this: “Carnahan snuck out the back door.”

HOWARD KURTZ: Time for Plan B? “With the flap over the Cash for Clunkers program, the media-political establishment is questioning whether the president’s health-care plan is a clunker as well. The opposition — including a very screechy woman who confronted Kathleen Sebelius at a town hall meeting — is asking how the administration can remake one-sixth of the economy if it can’t handle a used-car program. . . . I may be in the minority, but how can the administration declare the clunkers program a success when a billion-dollar effort that was supposed to last till November ran out of money in five days? Isn’t that a pretty spectacular miscalculation?”

Actually, a majority oppose the program now.

CASH FOR CLUNKERS GOES CLUNK: The New York Times’ Kit Seelye writes: “The White House and Congress may be giving the ‘cash for clunkers’ program a reprieve, but one can’t help wondering how many dealers and customers will have the confidence to go forward at this point. Things sound like a total mess in the showrooms.”

OUCH: My Mazda RX-8 is on the “cash for clunkers” list!

And I was just blogging about how happy I am with it. But . . a “clunker?” I guess it should make me feel better about the fact that the program is being stopped. Or should it?

ANOTHER MIS-STEP ON THE RECOVERY PLAN: AP sources: Govt to suspend ‘cash for clunkers’.

Congressional officials say the government plans to suspend the popular “cash for clunkers” program amid concerns it could quickly use up the $1 billion in rebates for new car purchases.

The Transportation Department called congressional offices late Thursday to alert them to the decision to halt the program, which offered owners of old cars and trucks $3,500 or $4,500 toward a new, more fuel-efficient vehicle.

Hmm. So the program ran through the money faster than they thought. I wonder how their healthcare plan will work out? . . .

Remember, people respond to economic incentives.

“CASH FOR CLUNKERS” RUNNING WITH TRUE GOVERNMENTAL EFFICIENCY:

Dealers reported problems with the government’s online system to get the transactions approved by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which is running the program.

Scott Lambert, vice president of the Minnesota Auto Dealers Association, said he was “astounded” to learn at a meeting Tuesday representing about 150 Minnesota dealers that not one has had a deal approved.

“We had dealers representing 1,500 to 2,000 transactions,” he said. “We asked how many had a deal approved yet, and not one hand went up.”

Lambert said the government has created a program that’s “so big and cumbersome that it can’t find a way to accept anything. We’re sending in good, reliable deals.”

It’s nerve-racking for the dealers, he said, because they have given the customer $4,500 and now the dealers need to be reimbursed.

Don’t worry, though — I’m sure they’ll do a better job with your prostate.

UPDATE: Moe Lane is not surprised. “Note that the program started on July 1, they only published the actual rules Friday, and they’re still working out how to get the dealers their money. If you’re shrugging over that, consider this: what’s essentially happening here is that car dealerships are giving $4,500 interest-free, unguaranteed loans to the federal government… and the determination of whether or not those loans get paid off is more or less going to be at the discretion of mid-level bureaucrats at the NHTSA. Even if they do repay every loan, it’s apparently going to take time for the system to smooth out; it’s an open question whether it’ll straighten out before the official end of the program in November. And the car dealerships – the only producers of goods in this particular equation, and the ones that the government is ostensibly trying to help – get all the headaches.”

Producers can’t catch a break under this Administration.

CASH FOR CLUNKERS: See if your car qualifies.

THE CASE AGAINST CASH FOR CLUNKERS.

RASMUSSEN: 54% Oppose “Cash for Clunkers” Plan To Spur Purchase of Greener Cars. “Government employees like it more than those who work in the private sector.” Plus this: “Because of the government’s ownership stake in the automakers, most Americans (57%) believe it’s likely the government will pass laws and regulations giving those firms an unfair advantage over other car companies.”

A LOOK AT THE “Cash for Clunkers” legislation.

WAIT, I THOUGHT HE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE THE MODERATE: Joe Biden Wants a Green New Deal. “That plan includes Green New Deal-style proposals such as a ‘civilian climate corps’ and the mass retrofitting of America’s homes and vehicles. It also reproduces key features of President Barack Obama’s environmental agenda, including a focus on regulating consumer products and the return of the questionably effective ‘cash for clunkers’ program. And it incorporates many of the concerns of the Democratic Party’s activist base, including a separate plan for pursuing ‘environmental justice’ by targeting federal subsidies to minority groups.”

Biden’s three main Green Nude Eel planks are indoctrination training for young people (what, did the public schools miss a few?), destroying millions of perfectly good used cars, and backdoor reparations.

Some “moderate.”

AND YOU CAN KEEP YOUR GAS-POWERED AUTO: Joe Biden promises as part of his Green New Deal program 100 percent zero-emissions vehicles — i.e. electrics, though they really aren’t ZEVs — by whenever. The Issues & Insights crew wonders about “the cost of all this? Who knows. Aside from the $2 trillion price tag that Biden put on his entire Green New Deal plan, he hasn’t broken down his EV mandate scheme. But Sen. Chuck Schumer has already proposed a cash-for-clunkers plan, which would cost $454 billion over a decade.”

I just pity the hapless federal bureaucrat who tries to tell my son he can no longer drive his 95 Mustang Cobra SVT restoration on the street. Few sounds in this world are sweeter than an American small-block at full song.

CLUNKER: Buttigieg bundler pushed “Cash for Fatties” federal proposal.

Just when the commotion caused by a top bundler for Pete Buttigieg was fading from political conversations, another problematic bundler has been exposed. This time it is Wendy Wanderman, an entertainment executive who specializes in film marketing and production. A taxpayer-funded initiative she proposed in 2009 has surfaced and is causing some heartburn for Buttigieg’s campaign. Her proposal, “Cash for Fatties” would pay people to lose weight.

Remember Cash for Clunkers, the Obama administration’s cash incentive program for drivers who traded in older automobiles to purchase newer fuel-efficient vehicles? This plan was along the same lines. She proposed that there be a program for the government to pay people to lose weight. She outlined her idea in a 279-word blog post published by HuffPost where she was a contributor at the time. The internet is forever and her old blog post is in the news.

Recent articles by Buttigieg’s fellow leftists would suggest this is a white supremacist dog whistle being put out by his campaign. Including this one, which Debra Heine spotted in September: Teen Vogue Writer Ties Perceptions About Obesity to White Supremacy.

THE POPULIST PARABLE OF ELIA KAZAN’S A FACE IN THE CROWD:

Miller’s rumination at the end of Rhodes’s meteoric career provides the film’s moral: “we get wise to them, that’s our strength. We get wise to them.” This sentiment is a hopefully populist notion, since it assumes that the average person’s ability to call out frauds and hucksters is in itself a bulwark against their rise to power. I hate to say it, but today this sounds almost naively optimistic. Perhaps Lincoln was right that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, but we can never be sure that the unfooled will be in the majority. And numbers are what matter.

What’s most disturbing about today’s crop of media-hyped demagogues isn’t that they are adored despite their faults—such as vulgarity, spite, ignorance, egomania, and greed—but precisely because of them. Embracing one’s mendacity is what passes for authenticity to many nowadays, as much as class signifiers like a twangy country accent and wearing denim used to do for the Rhodes types of yesteryear. Plenty of people in the public eye nowadays are just as venal as Rhodes is, but many no longer feel the need to even bother to disguise it.

A film like A Face in the Crowd is intended to be the antidote to this kind of demagoguery and media manipulation, and its searing ironies might open some eyes. But the key variable with satire isn’t always the artist—it’s the audience. No matter how keen the wit or jaundiced the eye, there’s simply no telling how many people will bother to pay attention long enough to hear the alarm bell that the satirist is ringing. The fact that the movie flopped when it came out in the summer of 1957 might have something to do with Kazan’s reputation at the time, but it doesn’t bode well for the prescription that it tries to offer to the body politic. If anything, with the benefit of hindsight, A Face in the Crowd seems more like a desperate prophecy than anything else, as its trenchant message goes unheeded even as it becomes freshly relevant with every election cycle.

While Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg  were careful not to spell out “Lonesome” Rhodes’ ideology, other than as a man with an unquenchable id, the character they created for Andy Griffith was partially inspired by Arthur Godfrey, who demolished his good guy image in 1953 by firing sidekick Julius LaRosa on the air. Less than 20 years later, Godfrey would reveal himself as yet another “Progressive against progress” when he spoke out against American supersonic passenger plane development in the early 1970s on the Dick Cavett Show, adding nastily that the US needs “that gook in the atmosphere about as much as we need another bag of those clunkers from the moon,” according to Cavett himself in a 2010 New York Times article. As for Andy Griffith, he would veer back towards his “Lonesome” Rhodes persona in his last years, by shilling for Obamacare in 2010. As Kathy Shaidle asked of Media Matters (who routinely compared Glenn Beck at the height of his superstardom to Rhodes), “What? No ‘Lonesome Roads’ references when they’d actually be appropriate?”

FACT-CHECKING THE “FACT-CHECKERS,” AGAIN: NRA says Clinton said something she said. Politifact says NRA claim ‘mostly false.’

Fiske argues that Clinton “focused her comments on voluntary buyback programs similar to those some U.S. communities have instituted for guns and the federal ‘cash-for-clunkers’ program.”

That’s demonstrably false. Clinton clearly said “the Australian example is worth considering.”

And that “Australian example” was an example of gun confiscation. It was not a voluntary program. Historian Varad Mehta wrote about the Australian program last year for the Federalist, breaking down exactly what it entailed.

“Australia outlawed semi-automatic rifles, certain categories of shotgun, and implemented strict licensing and registration requirements,” Mehta wrote. “The cornerstone of its new gun-control scheme, however, was a massive gun buyback program. The Australian government purchased 650,000 to one million guns with funds raised via a special tax.”

That buyback program was mandatory, Mehta wrote. One cannot claim to consider the Australian example and its effectiveness in removing guns without acknowledging that the reason it worked was that it was mandatory.

A Clinton spokesman told Politifact that the Democratic candidate “does not support national mandatory gun buyback programs, including those modeled after Australia’s program” and that she was only discussing voluntary buyback programs.

But the candidate absolutely discussed Australia’s program — which was a mandatory buyback program — and said it was “worth considering,” just as the NRA claimed.

Think of the “Fact Checkers” as Democratic Party narrative-control officers with bylines and you won’t go far wrong.

LOOKS LIKE WE’RE IN FOR NASTY WEATHER: CNBC reports “‘Zombie Economy’ May Give Markets a Scare in October.” 

Or as Mike Flynn writes at Big Government, “Storm Clouds: The Looming Obama Recession:”

Make no mistake, the deteriorating economic situation is the result of Obama’s policies. Since the end of the recession we’ve had massive stimulus, auto bailouts, cash for clunkers, ObamaCare, Dodd Frank and a host of new regulations. We have also been promised a huge tax increase should Obama win reelection. If you were intentionally trying to trigger a recession, you’d be hard pressed to come up with more effective policies.

Obama’s reelection campaign is predicated on the myth that the economy, while weak, is steadily improving. It isn’t–at all. Come November, Obama ought to take his rightful place in the unemployment line.

Or else a lot more of the rest of us will.

CONTRADICTION: If Corporations Aren’t People, How Can They Be “Greedy?”

Related: Who, Or What, Is Greedier Than The Government? “As Schumer mocks millionaires, Sessions proposes ‘Solyndra Rule.'”

“Washington asking for more tax revenue is like an alcoholic asking for more cash before a trip to the liquor store,” Sessions says in the video. “Even if the alcoholic asked a millionaire for the cash, it doesn’t change the fact that the money’s not being wisely used.”

Indeed.

UPDATE: Reader Eric Klaus emails:

When politicians, especially Obama talk about how we used to be able to do “Big Things” like send a man to the moon, or build the Hoover Dam… they are playing on Americans pride.

But Obama fails to understand this in today’s context. He has gone all in on “Green Energy” and “Bullet Trains” and “Rebuilding Roads and Bridges”…when the real “Big Things” are things like Google’s self driving cars.

Imagine for a moment…if he would have gone into office and laid out a plan that would pave the way for Self Driving Cars in 10 Years or 15 years. This is something that is actually obtainable…but has many formidable obstacles, the least of which is the actual technology. There are HUGE obstacles in updating the laws and regulations to accomodate self driving cars. There are huge obstacles in terms of accident liability. There are huge risks to companies developing these technologies if they happen to kill a child in a school zone. The regulatory framework is a bigger obstacle than the actual technology.

Imagine if he would have taken the lead in reworking the Legal and Regulatory Framework to accomodate the REAL cars of tomorrow. He would go down in history as a true visionary and leader. But unfortunately there isn’t room for corruption, graft and theft of funds in this technology..so therefore he bet the house on Solyndra and the Chevy Volt, and Cash for Clunkers.

Indeed.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Blame Bo! Did Obama’s Dog Eat The Recovery?

In his inaugural address 2 1/2 years ago, President Obama called for a “new era of responsibility.” Yet lately, his main goal in life seems to be escaping any responsibility for the lousy economy.

It’s getting so you have to keep a list of everyone and everything Obama wants to blame for the anemic economic recovery. . . .

Just to be clear, Obama’s policies alone are to blame for the current sorry state of the economy.

In his first two years, Obama had free rein to get his economic agenda through a heavily Democratic Congress: An $830 billion stimulus, billions more in auto bailouts, mortgage bailouts and cash for clunkers, ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank.

None of those packages worked. They produced the worst recovery since the Great Depression. That was true before the Arab Spring, the tsunami, Europe’s debt crisis and before Republicans won back the House.

At a press conference this summer, Obama said: “I’m not interested in finger-pointing.”

But that’s all he’s been doing for months.

Indeed.

MICHELE BACHMANN PRAISES ONE-YEAR INCOME TAX MORATORIUM. Okay, she’s the one with the LLM in Tax, not me, but this seems like a bad idea.

The weakness of our stumblebum “recovery” is largely based on regime uncertainty, not a lack of liquidity. Yeah, a year of no income tax would gin up spending, but only temporarily. If I were a business, I’d feel safer with a long-term ceiling on tax rates — and, better still, a moratorium on new regulations — than a one-year tax suspension. To me this just seems like “cash for clunkers” writ large.

The one argument I can see is that if Americans get used to a year without paying income tax, they’ll be much, much more resistant to tax increases in the future. I remember Harry Browne telling people to imagine how they could save for retirement, educate their children, etc. if they didn’t have to pay federal income tax. With this approach, people wouldn’t have to imagine. But if that’s Bachmann’s intent, I haven’t heard that.

Meanwhile, a commenter at the link (who claims to be a “tax guy”) thinks there would be no revenues if we had a moratorium on the income tax, but in fact I think it’s only about a third of federal revenue. Could we cut the budget by a third? Undoubtedly. Is there the political will to do so? Not now, but maybe if people got used to not paying. . . .

Still, I think this is a bad idea and my speculation about political effects is just after-the-fact cogitation, with no evidence that this is what Bachmann intends.

UPDATE: According to this it’s more like 45%. Still, not the only source or even the majority source of revenue, though it is the largest.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Fran Akridge writes:

First, I think Bachmann is saying some things that will keep her from being taken seriously among old-line Republicans. I am a Libertarian Republican but I can add and subtract and even multiply and divide.

However, someone (Goldwater?) used to suggest doing away with withholding so that we would “feel” exactly how much we are paying.

I do (and you may) remember the horror of paying both sides of Social Security when I was doing almost full-time consulting work.

And I remember the horror of small business people paying both sides of Social Security when I did taxes one year – many had lost withholding jobs and were doing anything to feed their families – they had figured they would owe no income tax and had forgotten about both sides of Social Security.

Ouch.

DON BOUDREAUX: “PRO-BUSINESS.”

There are two ways for a government to be ‘pro-business.’ The first way is to avoid interfering in capitalist acts among consenting adults – that is, to keep taxes low, regulations few, and subsidies non-existent. This ‘pro-business’ stance promotes widespread prosperity because in reality it isn’t so much pro-business as it is pro-consumer. When this way is pursued, businesses are rewarded for pleasing consumers, and only for pleasing consumers.

The second, and very different, way for government to be pro-business is to bestow favors and privileges on politically connected firms. These favors and privileges, such as tariffs and export subsidies, invariably oblige consumers to pay more – either directly in the form of higher prices, or indirectly in the form of higher taxes – for goods and services. This way of being pro-business reduces the nation’s prosperity by relieving businesses of the need to satisfy consumers. When this second way is pursued, businesses are rewarded for pleasing politicians. Competition for consumers’ dollars is replaced by competition for political favors.

The fact that more than 200 American business executives are in India with the President is cause to fear that any pro-business policies he might adopt will be of the second, impoverishing sort.

Wall Street and corporations, generally, are likely to prefer the second version, but taxpayers and consumers should not.

Plus, from the comments: “Does anyone doubt that an effort is being made to create a private sector employment bubble that it is hoped will not pop until after the 2012 election? The Fed is pumping and Obama is angling for export dumping; Hell, these guys think that cash-for-clunkers was great, so why would anyone be surprised if they started advocating subsidized exporting (de facto or de jure).” Not that it’s working for them so far.

UNEXPECTEDLY! Home Sales Drop 27%, Twice What Was Forecasted.

Plus, the realtors’ spin.

UPDATE: Some frightening charts.

Plus this: “The depth of the collapse suggests that in fact, the housing tax credit was not generating new demand as much as moving demand forward a few months. That means that we’re going to have to work out the aftermath in months of low home sales.” Yep. Like “cash for clunkers,” it was just a form of borrowing against future sales. We’ve had enough of borrowing, I’d think.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Tim Cavanaugh: “Should we be relieved or mad as hell that Treasury Department suits seem to realize their public comments on the economy are baloney?”