The Daily Cynic: If It's Broken, Make it Bigger and Give it More Money

Sorry guys, I have to talk Cash for Clunkers (C4C) again. It came out this morning that dealers and manufacturers are giving up on the program. The problems stem from the Dept of Transportation not paying dealers for the cars traded in under the program (check out my last post on C4C for more details). So the dealers took it on faith that the government would pay them back for the $3,500 or $4,500 discount they have the consumer on the new cars. No the government mullah hasn't materialized and the dealers (who were already desperate for cash in the first place) are stuck with all this fictional cash. So GM has stepped in for some of its dealers and is providing cash advances to the dealers themselves. Let's keep in mind that GM just came out of bankruptcy on July 10th. How good of an idea is to have a company that come out from Chapter 11 protection a little over a month ago lending large sums of money to faltering dealers? It's not a good idea at all but GM has little choice in the matter, the federal government has forced the auto industry into a corner (as if they needed the government's help). Once again, lofty goals from the federal government results in downright dismal policy and implementation.

Ok, now let's move on, the program sucks, let it die. But let's not forget to learn from this (the now infamous "teaching moment", copyright Boh'Rock during the Gates incident). The government can come up with these grandiose plans with extremely noble goals (save the auto industry and decrease emissions for example) but when it comes to writing the policy to "get shit done" so to speak and finally putting that plan into action, the government is lousy, inefficient, and dog shit slow. This often exacerbates whatever problem was trying to be fixed in the first place and everyone ends up worse off.

So take the above lesson and ask yourself "After this exhibition of governmental failure to manage a relatively minor amount of money, $3 billion, do we really want to hand them the keys to the healthcare system worth MUCH more than $3B?"

I was talking to a few people about this today and I came up with an analogy that I know my parents can relate to:

Your kid wrecks a nice car worth a good amount of money that you bought him (like my first car, nice but not that fast). Do you go out and then buy him a $200,000 Lamborghini capable of 200+mph? Absolutely not.

I don't want the government crashing and burning at 200mph because, guess what, all of us are riding shotgun.