After I wrote about the possible loss of jobs in the local auto industry on Wednesday, I wanted to bring up a bill which passed the House on Tuesday which sounds innocent enough but to me sets a dangerous precedent and insults my intelligence on several levels.
Its formal name is the Consumer Assistance to Recycle and Save Act but H.R. 2751 is better known as the “Cash for Clunkers Act”. According to this story from The Hill by Jim Snyder and Silla Brush, the bill would allow consumers to collect on a voucher up to $4500 if they trade in a “gas guzzling” car for one which gets more mileage per gallon. Obviously the concept was enticing enough to get both our local Congressmen to vote in its favor.
I’m sure many will ask what is wrong with this concept. However, we see just how the government is handling its running of the American auto industry and how they’re attempting to take away choice from the consumer by adopting stricter CAFE gas mileage standards. Moreover, I’m very leery of regulating behavior on the public dime, since the estimated tab for the program ranges up to $4 billion. To me it’s much like adding a particular tax break for doing whatever action the government wishes one to do.
At the moment the voucher goes toward buying a vehicle which gets as little as 4 more miles per gallon. But as the Hill story notes, the manner of payoff is still negotiable and may be set up to eliminate any chance that a car fitting the classic definition of a “gas guzzler” (e.g. sport-utility vehicle, light-duty truck) qualifies for the taxpayer-funded subsidy.
In an era where we’ve proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that throwing taxpayer money at a problem can make it far worse than it was when it started, this program once again promises to be a never-ending boondoggle that will only siphon money from taxpayers and line the pockets of some large entity. It’s yet another case where a Congress which should have known better to mess with the free market is listening to the wrong set of people with the wrong set of priorities.
Michael,
Thank you for bringing this legislation to light. It is just another dangerous precident being pushed by a socialist democratic agenda.
Free money is NOT free….
just like freedom.
“they’re attempting to take away choice from the consumer by adopting stricter CAFE gas mileage standards”
You do realize that the rest of the world has stricter standards than us and even with the improvement, we will STILL be far behind the world in 2016?
I have no sympathy for fools who think wasting money and resources in the name of “choice” is somewho warrented or responsible,
Does that make the rest of the world right? If you want to drive a lawnmower with seats feel free to, but let the market dictate what sells in the automotive world. There are people who like the space and safety aspect a larger, heavier vehicle provides – and there are those who like their Priuses.
Notice how $4 a gallon gas moved the auto market faster than any government regulation? By the way, I wonder if gas prices are creeping up slowly enough to that mark for President Obama’s liking. It moved up too fast for him the last time but devaluing the dollar is helping to push the per-barrel price of oil up quickly.
“Does that make the rest of the world right?”
Yes.
So you think “the market” always has the best interests of man in mind? You think it always does the proper thing which is most beneficial to the people it serves? Of course it doesn’t, greed will ALWAYS corrupt and skew what is right. That, as you know, is the inherent (fatal) flaw in capitalism. So there comes a point when we the people have to decide what is right, and not leave it up to “market forces” whose only real goal is to satisfy the CEOs or shareholders best interests. This is one of those points. And the first company to adapt, reinvent, and apply the new technology will profit the most. There’s your market forces.
So you think government needs to intervene because we don’t know any better? The “greed” argument cuts both ways as absolute power corrupts absolutely, and given the choice between making up my own mind or having it made up for me I prefer the former.
It’s not to say that there wouldn’t be benefits to having smaller cars (after all I drive a small coupe rather than an SUV) but there’s a vast market of people out there who have weighed the benefits to themselves vs. the perceived and barely measurable “risk” to the planet and decided to purchase a supposedly gas-guzzling SUV.
Nor do I think capitalism has a “fatal” flaw because greed affects any economic system…the only assured equality would be one of misery.
“So you think ‘the market’ always has the best interests of man in mind? You think it always does the proper thing which is most beneficial to the people it serves?”
All a free market does is allow people to buy and sell freely. What consumers choose to buy may not seem beneficial to you, but the joy of freedom is that you don’t get to tell me what is beneficial for me. I get to make that choice. Paternalism is at the heart of liberalism, as your comments show. In your view, buyers and sellers don’t have their own best interests in mind. We must give that power to the “best and the brightest” in government to tell us what is beneficial for us, right?
And the idea that only goal of “the market” is to satisfy the interest of CEOs or shareholders’ interests is ridiculous. The only way businesses thrive in a free market is by catering to consumers’ desires. Liberals like to overlook this, though, because to confront this truth head on is to be forced to admit that when consumers choose freely they choose a lot of stuff liberals don’t like. So, instead, liberals choose to hide behind a false view of the market that is easily refuted by even a superficial study of how business works.
I guess you “free Marketers” out there cannot complain about outsourcing, are happy when someone in India answers your phone call to Microsoft, and are against any tariffs, right? You also support NAFTA. You are against the Clean Air Act (the real one, not Bush’s fake one that increases pollution) because businesses will just naturally do the right thing for the environment, even if it makes their widgets cost more. Don’t let Big Government intervene and tell a business how to get sulfur out of the air! You also should just open the borders and allow companies to hire whoever they want–why not, the free market will determine what we pay! Quit regulating coal mines–that isn’t a free market solution! The coal mine owners will make good decisions based on the free markets, right?
I’m totally in favor of free trade and think that there should be no limits on immigration. I’m a true free marketeer and I disagree with conservatives who claim to support freedom but don’t support the right of people to buy and sell goods and services or their labor without government interference. It’s one of the things I love to needle Mike about. Look at my various comments to him when he starts ranting about illegal immigrants.
So, yes, get rid of tariffs and let the goods flow freely. Both workers and consumers will be better than when you have politicians making tariff decisions based on which special interest group has their ear. And outsourcing is fine. Read up on the concept of comparative advantage and you’ll see why we consumers shouldn’t be wasting our money paying people to do jobs when other people will do them for less money. And you, as a good liberal, should love outsourcing. Globalization has produced far better standards of living for those in developed nations than all the government aid programs ever have or ever will.
Environmental legislation is a trickier area. Pollution is an externality imposed on others, and that needs to be addressed. If you hurt others, as pollution does, you need to remedy that. How to go about it is something to discuss. The traditional method of command-and-control is a very inefficient way to do this, in my view.
Marc,
Well, I’ll give this to you: your beliefs are consistent! You cannot be a Republican and espouse those beliefs, so I’m guessing Libertarian?
I don’t “rant” about illegal immigrants because I’m against immigration, I do it because they’re ILLEGAL! If a government is making me follow law (even if I think they happen to be very much heavy-handed, particularly with “nanny-state” regulations), why shouldn’t everyone else?
I can understand the need for political asylum, but not one simply based on economics.
To expand on Marc’s point about outsourcing, though, the cost of labor isn’t the only consideration. Unfortunately, the United States has very regressive tax laws and onerous environmental regulations which also force companies to move operations overseas. It cannot be simply labor costs which would make a manufacturer decide to move operations to China and pay to ship their product back to this market (quite costly as the price of fuel skyrockets).
Unfortunately, the idea of hammering companies who move their operations overseas with taxes – as Obama seems to support – only serves as another tariff. It would be a much better job creator to lower the tax burden on this end, don’t you think?
FF — I’m a Republican, although I don’t call myself a conservative. I’m a libertarian Republican. Unfortunately, the Libertarian Party is both completely ineffective as well as populated by kooks. It’s not a good vehicle to pursue political change in our nation, so I’m in the GOP, trying to move it in a libertarian direction.
Mike — I know you and I have talked about this before, but I don’t think your “law and order” view holds much water. Illegal immigrants are coming here to work. They are willing laborers being hired by willing employers. Any law that impedes that is immoral and, if people break it, I don’t really think it’s all that big of a deal.
I’m sure that you recognize that an action is not necessarily wrong just because a government labels it a crime. In an extreme example, I hope you would not stand up for “law and order” if you lived in Nazi Germany, with its laws that you must turn in Jews who were hiding in your neighbor’s attic. In a less extreme example, do you really think anyone committed a real crime if he sold an AR-15 in 1996, even though it was against federal law?
To broaden the discussion, many of the same conservatives who say we have to round up illegals because they break the law are the same ones who think Scooter Libby should be pardoned and who defend the Bush Administration’s decision to torture detainees even though this is clearly against federal law. I’m not really sure about your views on these two things, but I know other anti-immigrant commentators clearly pick and choose what they are going to be so “law and order” about.
In the end, I think you’ll agree, sometimes it’s the moral thing to do to break a law. Some laws, such as the pre-Civil War Fugitive Slave Law, should certainly be disobeyed. With others, it’s more of a gray area. So your support for kicking illegals out of the country simply because they broke the law isn’t really an intellectually supportable position in and of itself. It requires much more justification. Yes, they broke the law, but if we both agree it’s a bad law, should the penalty be so severe? Why not offer them a way to become citizens legally and face some sort of penalty short of deportation for their “crime”? This solution to the “problem” of illegal immigration is far more humane and makes much more economic sense than the unrealistic idea we can round up so many people and deport them.
“Illegal immigrants are coming here to work.”
Yes, and many of them come here *illegally* to work at wages and under living conditions that are abhorrent to native-born Americans who are willing to work for a decent wage. They are here as victimizing criminals (holding “honest jobs” or not) and and many of them turn to violent crime when their illegally-held positions vanish.
They and their employeers – illegally hiring them – should be imprisoned for long stretches as an example to honest society of fitting punishment for their respective crimes.
If someone is willing to work and someone else is willing to hire that person, I fail to see why anyone who believes in limited government would think there should be a reason to stop this. Yes, illegals work for wages that are lower than native-born Americans would take. So what? Your labor is only worth as much as someone is willing to pay you for it. If a third person wants to do the same labor for less money, then there’s nothing wrong with that.
And, yes, illegals may live in ‘abhorrent’ conditions, but they are generally happy to do so. In fact, their willingness to live this way may show that they possess what used to be called the “Protestant work ethic,” such as being willing to delay gratification and save for the future. This is what all immigrant groups have done in our nation, from the Irish to the Italians to the Indians. Read some history. You’ll see that the very same things being said about illegal immigrants today were being said about every immigrant group in the past. Just as today, those views were misguided.
If you think that a willing employer hiring a willing worker should be a crime, then you want a level of government intervention in our lives that I flatly reject. I don’t want the government telling me who I can hire and who I can’t. I don’t want them forcing me to reveal the variety of information required by the laws being pushed by anti-immigrant politicians.
Our nation was founded on freedom and liberty. I’m sorry that you don’t believe in that. I, for one, do.
And just to clarify, while I’m fine with anyone coming to this country to work, I don’t think any immigrants (legal or otherwise) should get government housing, health care, education, welfare benefits, etc. Of course, I don’t think native-born people should get any of that stuff, either.