The title to today’s George Will Washington Post article is: “Americans have good reason not to believe Obamanomics”. For the complete article go to realclearpolitics.
I was particlarly interested in the clunker car topic. I remember how Obama preened when announcing its spectacular success, which turns out to be another Obama untruth. Please read:
“Barack Obama has self-nullifying plans for stimulating the small-business sector that creates most new jobs. He has just endorsed tax relief for such businesses but opposes extension of the Bush tax cuts for high-income filers, who include small businesses with 48 percent of that sector’s earnings. The stance of other Democrats seems to be that the Bush cuts were wicked in conception, reckless in execution — and should be largely, and perhaps entirely, extended.
Does this increase anyone’s confidence? About as much as noting the one-year anniversary of the end of another of the administration’s brainstorms.
The used-car market is an important mechanism for redistributing wealth to low-income persons: The price of a car drops when it is driven out of the dealership, but much of its transportation value remains when it enters the used-car market. Unfortunately for low-income people, the average price of a three-year-old automobile has increased more than 10 percent since last summer. This is largely because the Car Allowance Rebate System, aka “Cash for Clunkers,” which ended in August 2009, cut the supply of used cars.
Cash for Clunkers provided up to $4,500 to persons who traded in a car in order to purchase a new car with better gas mileage, but it stipulated that the used car had to be scrapped. The Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby reports that a study by Edmunds.com shows that all but 125,000 of the 700,000 cars sold during the clunkers program would have been bought even if no subsidy had been available. If this is so, each incremental sale cost taxpayers $24,000.
Even on environmental grounds the program was, Jacoby argues, “an exorbitant dud”: The reduction in carbon dioxide from removing older cars from the road cost, according to research at the University of California at Davis, $237 a ton (the international market prices carbon emissions credits at about $20 a ton) and the new higher-mileage cars mean a reduction of carbon dioxide emissions of less than what Americans emit every hour.
Obama is desperately urging consumers and investors to have confidence in his understanding of economics. They may, however, remember his characteristic certitude that “cash for clunkers” was ‘successful beyond anybody’s imagination’.”
Comment: “Duplicitous”, “disingenuous”, “self-contradictory”, “murky”, “liar”…..all, and many more such terms are used to describe who Mr. Obama is regarding his information sharing to his flock and how he describes his touches into world and national issues. Yet…….
in wildest imaginations, I suppose Obama might still be able to brag about his claim of clunker car success by pointing out that people, like me, and perhaps George Will himself, had total imagination the clunker car trick would not be and wasn’t a success, thus varifying Obamaclaim.
He seems to be consistently consistent regarding his disingenuousness.
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