And here I am, actively looking for a pre-1974 J-truck or W-truck, so I don't have to deal with the Smog Nazis and I can tune the engine to run properly and efficiently.
As an automotive hobbyist, I was outraged when I first heard about this, and I'm even more outraged now. Yeah, let's just take all of these cars and send them to the crusher.
Benefits? Let's see:
- Getting a high car payment every month.
- Shelling out taxpayer dollars for something of dubious public utility. (Just wait until this bill comes due! Borrowing from the future is never cheap...)
- Getting higher insurnace premiums - not only from having a newer vehicle, but from the necessity of "full coverage" due to the lien against it (not to mention the "Gap coverage" - since the loan amortisation ends up with you being "upside down" on the loan for the first two-thirds of the period.)
- Higher costs of maintenance. Parts cost more.
Oh yeah - you can get better fuel economy out of the deal. I don't think that's going to offset the TCO increase for the reasons given above...
Nah - I'll keep my twenty-year-old Jeep, particularly since no-one makes a suitable replacement for my needs. And, you're not going to get it without a fight from me - it's a versatile all-rounder that is cheap to maintain, cheap to repair, cheap to insure, and damned well should be cheap to register, if CA weren't getting greedy because they've misspent money for so many years... Back home, I'd be down to $25/year on tags. And, registering it as a truck instead of a car would drop insurance and not have me subject to the seat belt law while driving it (whereas in CA, not wearing a seat belt is a "primary offense" - you can get pulled over just for not wearing your seat belt, even if you're not actually doing anything else that is malum prohibitum. Wondermus.)
- I do not want to pick up a car payment.
- I really don't want a car payment for anything that is unsuitable for my needs.
- I do not want to deal with the Air Police any more than I absolutely have to - and even that is too much.
- I do not want to fork over any more to insurance than I absolutely have to - ergo, no new truck.
- You know, keeping my twenty-year-old Jeep on the road actually reduces my "carbon footprint" - since I use reman hard parts to keep it going, I've had a smaller carbon footprint for the last then years than I would have if I'd bought a new truck.
- And, frankly, I really don't care about propping up execs who have been misspending their revenues and not saving for a rainy day. Every time I hear about executive compensation, the question of, "Just how much money does a person need?" goes through my mind. If I think Congresscritters get paid too much, you can imagine what I think of what execs get paid (I often want to tell Congresscritters, "Just do what you're told, you're not being paid to think. If you were paid to think, you'd be paid a lot less.")
Every time I've listened to anything on the news from pols in the last fifteen years, they've told us that we need to "tighten our belts." I guess it never applied to them - they never tightened their belts, and now they want us to bail them out. I don't buy it. "Sell crazy someplace else. We're all stocked up here."
Proposition for a Constitutional Amendment - Federal budget outlays can never exceed expected revenues. Pay of elected officials would be the first thing to be cut, then assorted programmes that do not do anything for direct public benefit (like the National Endowment for the Arts.) Government manning, if necessary, shall be reduced to make up for additional shortfall. (Hey, it's what companies do!) This means civil service manning goes first, operations and military are not.
Yah, if this means that Congress and Senate don't get paid anything, so be it.
Oh - and put Congresscritters on Social Security and Medicare, and eliminate their retirement programme. And, let's go ahead and make it so you can't retire from elected service - if you're in office that long, you're doing something wrong (and usually doing to us. Ted Kennedy, are you listening?) That should get those programmes fixed in a hurry.
Eliminate the Internal Revenue Code (26CFR) and replace the Federal Income Tax with a National Retail Sales Tax (NRST) of not more than ten percent (preferably 5-7%.) No, it's not "revenue neutral" - they're just going to have to start cutting useless programmes and civil service files to make up for that as well.
Return to the "gold standard" for currency - give the dollar back an anchor it hasn't had for decades, and get it to settle down.
I've got ideas for fixing things that aren't just of the "spit and baling wire" approach - just no-one will listen. Do I think they'll work? What we've been doing so far has had the net effect of making things worse; so, logically, taking measures in the opposite direction should make them better, no? At least it's trying something new, and if what you're doing isn't working, you should try something else.
