Comments on The Belmont Club,"Cash for clunkers"

The destruction of real capital assets is an intellectual cousin, maybe a riff, on the practice of destroying functional weapons systems to purchase a non-good (it isn’t a “bad”) called “trust.” We destroy valuable and useable things such as ICBMs, CVs and LHAs and B-52s. We do these strategically and economically irrational acts without considering how these weapons could benefit our allies and stimulate new business for sub-contractors and refurbishers. We do this pursuant to treaties with countries that have a documented history of fraud and deception and indeed largely in accordance with treaties entered in to with a country that ceased to exist almost 20 years ago. Imagine how the strategic paradigms would shift if we transferred those systems to Australia.

My suspicion is that no one i the White House has ever taken a High School accounting class.

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Jim Nicholas,
(whose grandchildren have outgrown his chevy suburban)
Get with the spirit of the program. Don't just scrap the old car, scrap your grandchildren. Think of the long term reduction in the "carbon footprint" that would give you. You could probably get a whole roll of green stamps or such from Al Gore for them that you could use to send ice to polar bears. Once you have sent the next generation to the People's Recycling Center then you won't need a car. In fact once there is no future then there won't be any use for you. That should wrap everything up nice and tidy.

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RHW,
(who remembered seeing used cars from the USA in Latin America)
If only the Pinto was evidence of a mad scientist plot by the CIA to destroy Chavez by flooding his country with self detonating cars. Bwhahahaaaaa

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Once read that the great thing about the Ford Model-T was that anyone could fix it with readily available tools, including baling wire and spit, and that it was guaranteed to break down every 100 miles. That car made America into a nation of engineers. The Good Old American Know How that won WW-II and built a foundation for global prosperity was founded on a jalopy.

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RWE,
Just to follow up. Exploding Ford Pinto.

Milton Friedman discusses the Pinto and automotive economics.

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subotai bahadur,
I offer a prediction. Once a whole bunch of people are hooked into this program, and have added to their debt load and monthly outgo; the economy will continue to tank. A whole bunch of people will not be able to continue to make their payments.

Brilliant connecting of the dots here. Are Barney Franks', Chris Dodd's and Jamie Gorelick's fingerprints to be found on this?

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buddy larsen,
My recommendation is to avoid spending any time or energy arguing the birth certificate angle. It is essentially "magical thinking" that expects a solution to appear because someone wants it to. Classic example, accepting the argument that he was a UK/Kenyan citizen from his birth father and then claiming that since his parents were not really legally married, true but irrelevant since his father was a polygamist/bigamist who would be denied US citizenship but not a student visa, he still had the Kenyan citizenship and therefore must have been born there. Nooooo it just means that he constructed a facade over the fact that he was probably born out of legal wedlock.

Your information on the criminal financial links to this administration is most interesting. Clear and unambiguous evidence of these stories, the web of sleaze and corruption linking Dodd, Franks, Gorelick, Rezco, Raines etc. and Obama need to be produced and distributed and hammered home before the next election. This is the spadework we all need to be doing. Everything we say must be accurate and reliable.

JFSanders031,
(who linked to Shadow Government Statistics)
Thank you for that link, The author should be cleared before we take his numbers as gospel but it goes with my gut instinct.

Tcobb,
(who noted the effect of Cash for Clunkers is to raise costs for the poor)
You have the elitist Mass Transit for the Masses agenda well worked out. I frequently ride the electric sewer aka the People's Urban Transit Zystem.

Josh,
(who liked my thoughts on destroying strategic systems)
Thank you for your kind words.

Doug,
(who linked to a story on Chavez's support for Columbia's rebels)
In the NYT? Is there a lover's quarrel in paradise?