Lessons from Cash for Clunkers

By Michael L. McDonald

Introduction

Do you remember the kids you went to school with, who never seemed to do their reading, math, science, or history homework? Their teachers told them to do it, but they just couldn't find the time or the discipline. Many thought they would be worthless delinquents.

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The Detail

Well, many of them did get jobs, after all. Congress is dominated by them. But they haven't changed. They still don't read their assigned bills. They can not do the math to figure out how to balance the budget, or allocate money to the most important priorities. Science is just something they vote on with little regard or understanding of natural laws. And they have not learned the important lessons of history, such as constitutionally mandated limited government and individual liberty.

Recently, the Car Allowance Rebate System, CARS , a.k.a. Cash for Clunkers, which was weeks late being started, began to run out of money after only about a week of operation. The legislated CARS online application system that automobile dealers use is very difficult, prone to errors and crashes, false rejects, and very slow dealer reimbursement. Congress has acted throwing more money at CARS . They had no idea what they were doing, when they originally legislated CARS. Of course, they didn't include any reading, math, science, or history, in their decisions. They just used politics and other people’s money.

The original cars program was $1 Billion, which they later increased to $3 Billion. Do you suppose they did any math for the new, higher allotment, or is that amount just another super wild guess? Either way our over-spending, deep-in-debt Congress must borrow the money to pay for either spending level for CARS .

Like most laws implemented by Congress, CARS will cause many unintended consequences. Paying people up to $4500 for cars that are worth much less will create a shortage of cars and repair parts for cars in the under $4500 price category. People, who need a car in that price range, will have a harder time finding one, and the price of those cars will likely increase.

These same delinquents want to take over the whole United States health care system with more of their super wild guesses. Using CARS as a basis, how do you think they will do, running National Health Care? Current U.S. Health Care is about 2700 times the size of the original CARS appropriation. And they want to add another $1 trillion in government spending for government run health care. CARS is a simple process of approving a car trade, and issuing an allowance to a car dealer. Health Care is an incredibly more complex process of evaluating patients and citizen needs, and delivering timely, quality treatment to over 307 million UScitizens. CARS only involved about 200,000 buyers before it ran out of money, and still suffers all kinds of dealer paperwork problems. There will be many unintended consequences with government run health care, too.

The performance of Congress on CARS, like many other government run programs, has shown they can not be trusted to run a billion dollar program. It should be obvious that allowing them to run the current $2.7 trillion dollar health care system, one-sixth of the whole U.S. economy, is a major, health-threatening and economic mistake. We do NOT need a government invented health care program, like CARS, that is very difficult to use, prone to errors and crashes, false rejects, and very slow reimbursement with its poorly written rules, and ambiguous and oppressive control of our health choices.

8-19-09

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