I’ve got a great idea for a deficit reduction program.  It would work similarly to the “cash for clunkers” program.  Except this time instead of the government paying for your clunker vehicle, taxpayers could pay to have clunker politicians removed from office.  If given this opportunity I am quite confident we would have entirely new leadership and a budget surplus in next to no time.

A classic win-win, don’t ya think?

The idea came to me after reading this article in the WSJ:

Remember “cash for clunkers,” the program that subsidized Americans to the tune of nearly $3 billion to buy a new car and destroy an old one? Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood declared in August that, “This is the one stimulus program that seems to be working better than just about any other program.”

If that’s true, heaven help the other programs.

Cash for clunkers had two objectives: help the environment by increasing fuel efficiency, and boost car sales to help Detroit and the economy. It achieved neither. According to Hudson Institute economist Irwin Stelzer, at best “the reduction in gasoline consumption will cut our oil consumption by 0.2 percent per year, or less than a single day’s gasoline use.” Burton Abrams and George Parsons of the University of Delaware added up the total benefits from reduced gas consumption, environmental improvements and the benefit to car buyers and companies, minus the overall cost of cash for clunkers, and found a net cost of roughly $2,000 per vehicle. Rather than stimulating the economy, the program made the nation as a whole $1.4 billion poorer.

The basic fallacy of cash for clunkers is that you can somehow create wealth by destroying existing assets that are still productive, in this case cars that still work. Under the program, auto dealers were required to destroy the car engines of trade-ins with a sodium silicate solution, then smash them and send them to the junk yard. As the journalist Henry Hazlitt wrote in his classic, “Economics in One Lesson,” you can’t raise living standards by breaking windows so some people can get jobs repairing them.

The joke’s on us folks…

And lame.

Ok, so The One told us without the stimulus pork recovery plan unemployment would exceed 9%.  So, we spend billions on worthless projects and now have unemployment at 9.7%.  A truly scary number is that when you count folks who have taken part time work and those who have just given up, the rate is at 17%.   Well, Barry did promise us CHANGE, and we sure are getting it.  Let’s HOPE he doesn’t have any other tricks up his sleeve.

Er, well.  Then there’s this:

GM’s sales are down 45% from last September (when sales were already bad enough to drive the company into banrkuptcy). Chrysler is down 42%. Ford is only down 5%. Car buyers are clearly punishing the two bailout recipients brutally. Robert Farago of Truth About Cars–who has been right before–predicts that GM and Chrysler will both “go down by the end of next year” without a second, new federal bailout. The only question, he says, is whether the two manufacturers will need the cash before the 2010 midterm elections.

I’m really not all that surprised.  I for one would never purchase a vehicle from GM (government motors) and although I have been a near lifelong customer of Chrysler (Dodge trucks and Jeeps) I don’t think I could bring myself to buy a Fiat (whatever the name on the car).

Sad to say, but the country might be a helleva lot better off if little Barry would confine himself to Olympic bids.  At least there his failures only impact one city at a time.

God help us.

It’s always fascinating to me to read the viewpoints and observations of folks outside the USA on the sorry state of our nation and the apparent incompetence of our President.  Such is the case in an article entitled “Lament for a nation” by David Warren in The Ottawa Citizen.  Mr. Warren compares Obama to Gorbachev in presiding over the decline of the USA and the breakup of the Soviet Union.  I think that comparison is a bit strained, but I think it is hard to argue with this:

There is a corollary of this largely unspoken assumption: that no matter what you do to one part of a machine, the rest of the machine will continue to function normally.

A variant of this is the frequently expressed denial of the law of unintended consequences: the belief that, if the effect you intend is good, the actual effect must be similarly happy.

Very small children, the mad, and certain extinct primitive tribes, have shared in this belief system, but only the fully college-educated liberal has the vocabulary to make it sound plausible.

With an incredible rapidity, America’s status as the world’s pre-eminent superpower is now passing away. This is a function both of the nearly systematic abandonment of U.S. interests and allies overseas, with metastasizing debt and bureaucracy on the home front.

And while I think the U.S. has the structural fortitude to survive the Obama presidency, it will be a much-diminished country that emerges from the “new physics” of hope and change.

Speaking of Canadians, lately this Neil Young song has been ringing in my ears:

Its awful hard to find a job
On one side the government, the other the mob
Hey, hey ain’t that right
The workin’ man’s in for a hell of a fight.

Oh, this country sure looks good to me
But these fences are comin’ apart at every nail.