What happened to all of the doom and gloom economic threads?

koalabear said:

283,00 jobs lost during the "Summer of Recovery".

" It could have been worse."

Click to expand...

mercury14 said:

Yeap, we could have had Republicans in power who let the largest financial institutions collapse instead of bailing them out. And no stimulus.

How are you even doubting for a second that we'd be in a far worse situation?

Click to expand...

Beco said:

Again, if the bailouts under Bush were so bad, why is Obama's better? He's still in his first term and we can actually see them not working.

Click to expand...

mercury14 said:

(I didn't say bailouts under Bush were bad)

What do you mean the Obama stimulus isn't working? It had $288 billion in tax cuts. Apparently your whole "tax cuts are the key to stimulating the economy" philosophy is crap?

Click to expand...

mercury14 said:

(I didn't say bailouts under Bush were bad)

What do you mean the Obama stimulus isn't working? It had $288 billion in tax cuts. Apparently your whole "tax cuts are the key to stimulating the economy" philosophy is crap?

Click to expand...

Sean Renaud said:

Uh Cash for Clunkers was a success particularly in what it was meant to accomplish which was only sorta economic. It was about improving the enviroment, it was a green project. The claim that people would have bought those cars anyway is silly, in order to apply for CfC you had to have a peice of shit car and people who own peices of shit don't buy new they buy used. The majority of those people wouldn't have been able to afford a new car and again this was more about lowering dependence on foreign oil than it was the economy anyway.

Click to expand...

koalabear said:

So how much did the program lower are dependence on foreign oil?

Click to expand...

Sean Renaud said:

Uh Cash for Clunkers was a success particularly in what it was meant to accomplish which was only sorta economic. It was about improving the enviroment, it was a green project. The claim that people would have bought those cars anyway is silly, in order to apply for CfC you had to have a peice of shit car and people who own peices of shit don't buy new they buy used. The majority of those people wouldn't have been able to afford a new car and again this was more about lowering dependence on foreign oil than it was the economy anyway.

Click to expand...

Boston Globe said:

‘Clunkers,’ a classic government folly
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | September 1, 2010

IN THE market for a used car? Good luck finding a bargain: The price of “pre-owned’’ vehicles has climbed considerably over the past year. According to Edmunds.com, a website for car buyers, a three-year-old automobile today will set you back, on average, close to $20,000 — a spike of more than 10 percent since last summer. For some popular models, the increase has been much steeper. In July, a used Cadillac Escalade was going for around $35,000, or nearly 36 percent over last July’s price.

Why are used-car prices rocketing? Part of the answer is that demand is up: With unemployment high and the economy uncertain, some car buyers who might otherwise be looking for a new truck or SUV are instead shopping for a used vehicle as a way to save money.

But an even bigger part of the answer is that the supply of used cars is artificially low, because your Uncle Sam decided last year to destroy hundreds of thousands of perfectly good automobiles as part of its hare-brained Car Allowance Rebate System — or, as most of us called it, Cash for Clunkers. That was the program under which the government paid consumers up to $4,500 when they traded in an old car and bought a new one with better gas mileage. The traded-in cars — which had to be in drivable condition to qualify for the rebate — were then demolished: Dealers were required to chemically wreck each car’s engine, and send the car to be crushed or shredded.

Congress and the Obama administration trumpeted Cash for Clunkers as a triumph — the president pronounced it “successful beyond anybody’s imagination.’’ Which it was, if you define success as getting people to take “free’’ money to make a purchase most of them are going to make anyway, while simultaneously wiping out productive assets that could provide value to many other consumers for years to come. By any rational standard, however, this program was sheer folly.

No great insight was needed to realize that Cash for Clunkers would work a hardship on people unable to afford a new car. “All this program did for them,’’ I wrote last August, “was guarantee that used cars will become more expensive. Poorer drivers will be penalized to subsidize new cars for wealthier drivers.’’ Alec Gutierrez, a senior analyst for Kelley Blue Book, predicted that used-car prices would surge by up to 10 percent. “It’s going to drive prices up on some of the most affordable vehicles we have on the road,’’ he told USA Today. In short, Washington spent nearly $3 billion to raise the price of mobility for drivers on a budget.

To be sure, Cash for Clunkers gave a powerful jolt to car sales in July and August of 2009. But it did so mostly by delaying sales that would otherwise have occurred in April, May, and June, or by accelerating those that would have taken place in September, October, or later. “Influencing the timing of consumers’ durable purchases is easy,’’ Edmunds CEO Jeremy Anwyl wrote a few days ago in a blog post looking back at the program. “Creating new purchases is not.’’ Of the 700,000 cars purchased during the clunkers frenzy, the estimated net increase in sales was only 125,000. Each incremental sale thus ended up costing the taxpayers a profligate $24,000.

Even on environmental grounds, Cash for Clunkers was an exorbitant dud. Researchers at the University of California-Davis calculated that the reduction of carbon dioxide attributable to the program cost no less than $237 per ton. In contrast, carbon emissions credits cost about $20 per ton in international markets.

Using Department of Transportation figures, the Associated Press calculated that replacing inefficient clunkers with new cars getting higher mileage would reduce CO2 emissions by around 700,000 tons a year — less than Americans emit in a single hour. Likewise, the projected reduction in gasoline use amounted to about as much as Americans go through in 4 hours. (And that’s only if you assume — contrary to historical experience — that fuel consumption decreases when fuel efficiency rises.)

When all is said and done, Cash for Clunkers was a deplorable exercise in budgetary wastefulness, asset destruction, environmental irrelevance, and economic idiocy. Other than that, it was a screaming success.

Click to expand...

Sean Renaud said:

Uh Cash for Clunkers was a success particularly in what it was meant to accomplish which was only sorta economic. It was about improving the enviroment, it was a green project. The claim that people would have bought those cars anyway is silly, in order to apply for CfC you had to have a peice of shit car and people who own peices of shit don't buy new they buy used. The majority of those people wouldn't have been able to afford a new car and again this was more about lowering dependence on foreign oil than it was the economy anyway.

Click to expand...

Frisco_Slug_Esq said:

If we wanted to lower our dependence of foreign oil, we would drill baby drill...

Click to expand...

RightField said:

If Obama gets hits a 5 on a par 4 golf outing, Gibbs comes back to the press room and declares the day an outstanding success and describes how its an indication that the economy is turning around. They interview the female caddy and note that she's female and then Gibbs relates how that's another indicator that things are "fair" in the US because they have chosen a female caddy and she's doing an outstanding job. Overall, Gibbs relives the days events with great relish and relates each nuance of the day The press comes along and swallows this load whole and elaborates and it hits the airwaves and cable within a couple hours that things are good in the USA.

Of course, hours later the lit posters come on and repeat these good tidings word for word and then the Republicans and opposition get on and say "He just hit a bogey on the local golf course, how is that helping or indicating that the economy is getting better?" and the liberal lit posters get back on and say "Hater!" and "All you do is C&P, don't you think on your own" and "You don't care anything for the female caddy's in this world!".

I think I'm getting bored with this place.

Click to expand...

Frisco_Slug_Esq said:

I see Obama's next attempt to "heal" (I still say he means to heel) the economy is going to be to offer assistance to those who can't afford their homes, yet another delaying tactic which prevents present pain for pure political benefit.

More broken windows by keeping those homes off the market...

Maybe we could apply the commerce clause and force him to stop "withholding" them from the market?

Click to expand...

Byron In Exile said:

You know he doesn't give a flying damn, right?

He's the First Black President.

Once he leaves office, he'll become a billionaire.

His job in the meantime is just to say stuff that ignorant Americans can believe in.

Click to expand...

Ulaven_Demorte said:

I can connect the dots for you on how it lowered "are" dependence on foreign oil.

1) Trade in an old piece of shit that gets 15 MPG.
2) Receive an incentive to buy a new vehicle that's MUCH more fuel efficient.
3) Our demand is lower because the new vehicle consumes less fuel. In most cases roughly half as much under the same driving conditions.

It's not that tough to figure out really. Not only are more people driving more fuel efficient vehicles, but they tend to pollute less than the old Pieces of shit did too.

Click to expand...

kbate said:

It is tough to figure out - many of the "clunkers" turned in were not on the road anyway. People pulled junk out of back fields, added gasoline, slapped plates on and traded it in. How better to get $4500 for rubbish that a week ago would have cost you $150 to have hauled away by the junkman.

Click to expand...