How very … true … and reasonably argued … and so unlike much of the blanket incoherent criticism I’ve seen thus far. Well said.
I wouldn’t call this great growth for cripe sake. We’re barely back to 07 levels of employment. During the war, the difference was that everyone was now working and many two or three jobs, plus women entered the work force who had not been there before. If you were not working, you were drawing military pay. So there was a lot of money all of sudden and no where to spend it so they bought bonds to control inflation. In contrast, the current spending is for people to not work or on infra-structure which only benefits a small segment. Building ships and bombs required skilled work being done all across the country with a shortage of labor. Quite different than the lame peace time spending expected to stimulate the economy. It is not.
The C4C really I think did nothing more than get people talking about buying a car after a long period of people not wanting to buy cars for one reason or another. But think back to the terrible 80’s where people were buying cars like crazy because the prices were going up every month. You wanted to hurry up and buy because if you didn’t you’d pay a lot more later on. Carter just didn’t seem to understand what was going on. Sound familiar?
As far as experience, I know of someone that traded in a Dodge Minivan as a clunker and bought a Nissan Xterra which gets similar or worse mileage. In 2 years they had to sell the Nissan due to high fuel usage.
If another World War II is the answer to full employment, I think I’ll pass. Full employment does not necessarily mean prosperity. Destroying perfectly good things just so people will have jobs replacing them is busywork. We might as well hire professional vandals to break windows to boost the economy or professional thieves to break into our cars and homes and steal stuff. The problem with that approach is eventually every car and home starts having the sign I saw in someone’s car window posted on it.
“Car is not locked, the radio has already been stolen, please don’t break another window”.
I’m curious why you think, from the point of view of the C4C program,making hard to get pats for cars that it considers to have poor gas mileage would be a “very unfortunate unintended” consequence? It seems like a win-win for the program to me. They wanted to get cars with poor gas mileage off the road, so they provided incentive to get a bunch destroyed, and then made it harder to keep the ones that weren’t traded in running.
If the government were truly concerned about poor gas mileage, then the Cadillac Escalade, among many others, would be banned. Rather than sticking it to poor people who shouldn’t be trying to afford a car payment, why not ban status vehicles that get garbage mileage?
The end result of C4C is that people who cannot afford to spend extra money on car purchases, now have to spend extra money on car purchases because the used car market was artificially constricted by destroying over half a million of them.
As has become fairly typical, the government, with the best intentions in mind, threw money at the wrong place (another example being bailing out the banks in the '08 collapse rather than bailing out the homeowners who then would have bailed out the banks by paying their mortgages). It would have been better to spend the $3 billion squandered on C4C by offering high-efficiency vehicle grants to poor people, or better yet, public transportation subsidization for poor people in urban centers.
@BLE: “If another World War II is the answer to full employment, I think I’ll pass.”
Me too. BTW, that’s an interesting straw man you’ve got there.
@shadowfax, Congress does tax cars with poor gas mileage. They just don’t tax trucks with poor gas mileage. Maybe that should be instituted. Any new truck under a certain weight limit will have a gas guzzler tax associated with its purchase. Of course, the problem comes when people use these trucks for business. Hey, my neighbor uses his Cadillac Escalade EXT for business. I’m not sure if he uses his Escalade ESV or Range Rover Sport for work, though. And his live at home daughter’s Grand Cherokee is definitely not used for work.
The federal government taxes gasoline at a rate of 18.4 cents per gallon, so in a sense, they tax all vehicles with poor gas mileage … indirectly.
Quickly crunching the numbers:
-Someone who gets 15 MPG will pay $12.27 in federal taxes for every 1,000 miles traveled.
-Someone who gets 20 MPG will pay $9.20 in federal taxes for every 1,000 miles traveled.
-Someone who gets 30 MPG will pay $6.13 in federal taxes for every 1,000 miles traveled.
-Someone who gets 40 MPG will pay $4.60 in federal taxes for every 1,000 miles traveled.
… so getting a fuel efficient vehicle amounts to giving yourself a tax cut every time you fill up at the pump. That seems fair to me, but unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be enough of an incentive to get a lot of people to save fuel.
The nice thing about fuel taxes, though, is that you aren’t just taxing people based on the vehicle they own; you’re also taxing them based on how they use their vehicles, their driving styles, their wasteful idling, etc.
A few states are testing replacing their state gasoline tax with a “mileage tax” that is equivalent if your vehicle gets about 20 mpg. This punishes gas misers and rewards gas guzzlers. Sheer lunacy.
Yeah the luxury tax worked real well at killing the yacht business. I think we should lose the “lets tax them” mentality.
I don’t think anyone around here has a “let’s tax them” mentality, and I think the yacht business is alive and well. I know a few yacht builders in my area, and they seem to be doing quite well. The husband of a friend of mine builds custom yachts for a living. He is self employed, and he’s raking it in faster than he can handle it.
Gasoline taxes tax everyone at the same rate. They are the USA’s flat tax in action.
Whitey@BLE: “If another World War II is the answer to full employment, I think I’ll pass.”
Me too. BTW, that’s an interesting straw man you’ve got there.
Well, it might be a straw man if I was actually trying to attack you.
I was simply trying to counter the idea that WWII brought about prosperity, actually, it brought about extreme sacrifice and hardship.
Full employment does not necessarily mean prosperity. Prosperity comes from getting things done, from being productive and efficient. It does not come from keeping people occupied with useless busywork.
I don't think anyone around here has a "let's tax them" mentality, and I think the yacht business is alive and well. I know a few yacht builders in my area, and they seem to be doing quite well. The husband of a friend of mine builds custom yachts for a living. He is self employed, and he's raking it in faster than he can handle it.
Because the luxury tax on yachts was repealed three years after enacted because it was so damaging to the industry:
Yeah you beat me to it. Just one article from 1991 but if you google the luxury yacht tax you’ll get over 100,000 references in seconds. It was a disaster. Taxed boats over $100K but not vacation homes. Really dumb but going after what they thought was the 1% blue blazer croud. I don’t own a boat though.
Buying a car that gets better gas mileage is sort of like a tax cut, and that’s a good thing. But when enough people do it, there is a large loss of revenue, and less money available for road maintenance. This leads to higher taxes to make up for the shortfall. 2014 is the first year of fuel tax increases in MD. Despite that, E10 is $3.199 today at my favorite gas station.
I’m looking forward to the day I can commute in/on an electric vehicle, and stop feeding big oil and paying fuel taxes almost completely. I say almost because I live in a town with municipal power, and we have a fuel charge on our electric bill. If the town can get out of debt, they plan to bring in Florida Power & Light (a private company), and our rates will go down.
I don’t mind paying gas tax since it pays for our roads and bridges. Someone has to pay them and gas tax is pretty inconsequential. In Minnesota way back in the early 1900’s AAA supported the establishment of the first gas tax provided it went for road construction. It remained that way due to the courageous efforts of AAA until recent history when the fund has been siphoned off to pay for public transit subsidies. I don’t see why I should have to pay for a bus rider in Minneapolis when I have to pay the full cost of getting around but all in all I don’t mind road taxes.
I'm looking forward to the day I can commute in/on an electric vehicle, and stop feeding big oil and paying fuel taxes almost completely.
Whitey: don’t you think that, as EVs grow in popularity, mechanisms will be enacted to get them to pay their fair share of transportation tax? More importantly, wouldn’t you feel a certain ethical culpabity about freeloading off all the other taxpaying drivers?
I’m sure government will find a way to tax EVs, but as so many are fond of pointing out, most EVs get their power from fossil fuels, and there are a fair amount of taxes on my electric bill already, so it’s not really a free rider situation, is it? It’s not like the electricity is free or untaxed.
The important thing is to cut the oil companies out of the equation.