But who’s counting?

Ralph Nader--Car and Driver Interview

When you buy a new car, after you do the test drive you do a lot of sitting around in offices with plastic plants or showroom floors with shiny monster SUVs while they pile up the papers you need to sign, even when you pay cash the way we did in November when we bought our 2010 Town and Country. I can't just SIT. I have to be reading or writing, so I did both, and took notes on the Car and Driver interview with Ralph Nader in the September 2009 issue. Maybe you're too young to remember, but Ralph Nader was the consumer crank of my generation who got all the press in the 1960s and 70s. Didn't hurt that he was Hollywood handsome, very photogenic and quirky--he actually lived the lifestyle he recommended for others, as I recall. On auto safety, he says history has redeemed him, and the critics in the government, industry and the media now look like fools. Even the horse chariots in Roman times had a padded dash, he said.

"Everything we’ve gotten so far, we should have gotten years ago. And everything we don’t have, we should have gotten years ago. The first generation of auto safety devices are in play now—you know, seatbelts, airbags, padded dash panels, collapsible steering columns, side protection, head restraints, things like that—but there’s a second generation out there. Part of it is made up of upgrading existing standards that came out in 1968 or so, because they get obsolete. So we need to take that first generation and upgrade them—better collapsible steering columns, stronger side protection, airbags that protect you at higher speeds. Then there’s the second generation, of which most people are not aware, like collision-avoidance systems, much more effective vehicle dynamics in terms of handling and braking—all these should have been phased in back in the 1980s and 1990s. All in all, though, over a million lives have been saved."

When asked what he could have done differently, he responded,

"Well, I’d like to have had a different set of presidents."

But he also tosses in the unions with the automakers as blame worthy, and you can look at the current bailouts and payoffs for health care boondoggles and bennies right up to today to see that he is correct.

"Fuel efficiency, that was the real disaster. Anybody could have seen this coming, and the UAW and GM marched up on Capitol Hill and crushed, year after year, any attempt at fuel-efficiency legislation. And that’s why GM went bankrupt. They did it to themselves."

Then he closes with a quote (paraphrased I assume) from Ross Perot.

" He was talking to some senior GM executives in 1986, and he said here’s a company that doesn’t like its dealers, doesn’t like its workers, doesn’t like its customers—you people don’t even like each other!"

That said--and I do believe auto safety is important--it's not more so than some common sense. Lowering the speed limit to 55 in the 1970s not only saved thousands of lives and billions of gallons of fuel, it made driving far more pleasant and allowed much smoother, more pleasant trips. The decade following 1995 when the speed limits went back up (had been 55 mph), studies show an additional 12,500 people died and about 36,500 injured through 2006, even though overall deaths are going down due to safer cars, more seat belt use, and alcohol crack downs. And health care costs? Gracious, even lives that are saved through safety features, if those people are in an accident the costs to the person, the insurance companies, their investors, the court system in litigation and the state and federal tax system while people are out of work, are billions. Better to get the driver and passengers to their location at "fifty five and alive," but no one wants that any more. The death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan of our brightest and best? Not high compared to our highways. We lose 5,000+ teen-agers (16-20) a year on the highways just because we won't raise the legal driving age from 16 to 18! Their passengers are in danger, too--nearly 5,000 teen passengers were killed in 2006.

Where are our priorities! I can only conclude there is no political advantage to either party or lobbyists or the free market or wing-nuts at either end of the political spectrum to save lives through common sense and raising the legal age to drive.

The cash for clunkers clunk

Now the White House is going after Edmunds for telling the truth.



"A total of 690,000 new vehicles were sold under the Cash for Clunkers program last summer, but only 125,000 of those were vehicles that would not have been sold anyway, according to an analysis released Wednesday by the automotive Web site Edmunds.com.

Still, auto sales contributed heavily to the economy's expansion in the third quarter, adding 1.7 percentage points to the nation's gross domestic product growth. [That's a gummit lie because moving government money around is not expansion.]

The Cash for Clunkers program gave car buyers rebates of up to $4,500 if they traded in less fuel-efficient vehicles for new vehicles that met certain fuel economy requirements. A total of $3 billion was allotted for those rebates.

The average rebate was $4,000. But the overwhelming majority of sales would have taken place anyway at some time in the last half of 2009, according to Edmunds.com. That means the government ended up spending about $24,000 each for those 125,000 additional vehicle sales." Money CNN

How does this save the auto industry?

Or the unions? 3,000 auto dealerships with Obama as the CEO of the auto industry will close. Thousands and thousands of people put out of work (average of 50 per dealership). Did you Democrats and RINOs and guilt ridden Republicans know what you were voting for--destroy the little guy? Here's how much Obama knows about running the auto industry. He is destroying the local tax base in thousands of communities--city, suburban and rural.

". . . manufacturers do not own dealerships. Independent business people do. These new car dealers have invested their money to purchase real estate, build buildings, and buy inventory, tools and equipment.

The money invested by new car dealers provides customers with the opportunity to shop locally for new and used vehicles. These same new car dealers provide warranty, recall and repair services for the motoring public.

These independent business people pay real estate tax, property tax, sales tax, FICA tax, income tax (state and local), and unemployment insurance. These dealers provide employment. They pay for their employees' training, health insurance and benefits.

The dealer is the auto manufacturer's customer. That being the case, does it make any sense to claim the manufacturer's problem is that they have too many customers?" A Nebraska car dealer

Of course it makes sense to the Obama Administration! They have declared War on the Economy and on the American people.

Our purple and green bureaucracy

As the New Yorker cartoon by Frank Cotham says, “It’s always cozy in here. We’re insulated by layers of bureaucracy.”

Red state or blue, green bureaucrats are pure gold for large companies--Goldman Sachs and General Electric, for instance--they help regulate the little guy out of competition. Even back when I was a liberal writing about supermarket coupons and sweepstakes (1983), I noted that the best and biggest offers came from the largest food companies, and eventually through the cooperation of the penny pinching consumer, would put the small companies out of business and then raise prices.

Forward looking green businessmen like Henry Paulson (our Bush Secretary of Treasury who helped design our current bailouts) and his partner Al Gore (our Clinton vice president) in GIM will get rich from imaginary carbon footprints and cap and trade points. Both will lead a lifestyle of wealth and privilege the rest of us can only imagine, with you and me footing the bill, and Joe Biden leading cheers assuring us he‘s looking out for the middle class tax payer.

But the poor will pay the most. The US poor are rich by the rest of the world’s standards, but even they will be hurt by the green quicksand that drags down the economy. It’s only when you’ve got the basics of life taken care of that you can turn your attention to taking care of the environment. It doesn’t make sense to spend billions of resources fantasizing about miniscule amounts of this or that in our food, water and air when millions around the world go to bed hungry or are unable to work, weakened by malaria through the hyper-vigilant actions of environmentalists fearing the death of a bird egg. There are thousands of non-profits, religious groups and think-tanks dependent on keeping us terrified and anxious about all the products, foods, building materials, and vehicles in our lives. They "earn" their salaries and research funding with government grants. Technically, they aren't on the government payroll, but they might as well be.

Our green bureaucrats will eventually destroy American auto manufacturers, those three companies they first built by reducing competition (did you ever wonder where the rest of them went?) or taxing them out of the industrial Midwest. First the jobs building automobiles went south, and then to overseas workers, to be shipped back to us. The newer angle is to force on us cars no one wants, built in plants that could only please a large union work force, supporting the medical bills of millions of UAW retirees for a few more years.

Dear readers, the men and women we’ve sent to Washington aren’t stupid; but at their deep purple heart of heart on the fringes, they are socialists. They may reach to extol Reagan, but they stand on the back of FDR. Government will own it all--and 2008 will be the watershed year. And for those officials of either party--staff, appointees or elected--it’s a paid-in-full ride to the end. When they retire, or are voted out, they hang around in Washington think tanks or their branches and become lobbyists, researchers, writers or conference organizers, but nothing changes.

Other than being larger, with a bigger budget, do you see anything different between the Clinton bureaucracy of 1998 and the Bush bureaucracy of 2008? And they’re all back through the revolving door, along with a few newer Chicagoans funded by the sheiks from the middle east who banrolled the Clinton.

When the deep purple falls
over green regulatory walls
And the stars begin to twinkle in DC—
In the mist of a memory
you wander back to me
Taking my taxes with a grin...