Who Are We Stimulating, Anyway?

With all the stimulus packages being handed out over the last few months, I’m having trouble figuring out why unemployment is still nearly 10%, the deficit is ballooning, the national debt has risen to amounts that require scientists to invent new numbers to describe it, and the man in the street is mad enough to chew horseshoe nails.

Cash for clunkers paid off the unions in August so well that the people who would have bought cars in September and October just moved it up a little. There won’t be any year over year gain. Plus, a bunch of them bought Toyotas.  That really helped the American auto industry.  The only good thing I can see here is that they managed to remove a lot of Obama bumper stickers from the highways.

Let’s do a little math on the wonders our tax dollars provided.  Most of the cars traded in on the Cash for Clunkers scam averaged about 15 miles per gallon.  If they got much more, they didn’t qualify.  At 12,000 miles per year they used 800 gallons of gas per year.  The new cars averaged 25 miles per gallon, and at 12,000 miles per year, used 320 gallons per years of gas.  This saved a whopping 460 gallons per year.  If the claimed 700,000 cars were actually traded in and taken off the road, this added up to a savings of  224 million gallons, or about 5 million barrels of oil.  This is about ¼ of one days consumption in the United states.  At $75/bbl this equates to $350 million.  We spent 3 Billion dollars to save $350 million.  I’ve got ex wives that think that way…  With this money, they bought the votes of selected car dealerships and the unions.  Out of your wallet, whether you got a new car or not.

I’ve watched the network news, plus MSNBC, CNN and the rest, and read The New York Times, and Pravda enough to know how this administration thinks.  I can help them out on their next boondoggle on the road to economic perdition.  The administration just slapped a big tariff on Chinese tire makers.  This was another sop to the unions.  Apparently the Chinese have figure out how to pour rubber in a mold for less than $45.00 an hour.  The major tire manufactures are looking to move to Viet Nam.  The democrat party will never slap a tariff on those poor people, what with all the guilt they have over rooting up their country in the late unpleasantness. It won’t really help the unions, but it sure will raise tire prices, and besides, it looks good, and we’re doing something, RIGHT NOW.

I’ve got a better idea.  The administration should subsidize the switch-blade knife manufacturers.  This pointless (oops, bad pun) industry could employ countless people at ridiculous wage, all thanks to Card-Check, and all members of the new Switchblade Knife & Crack Pipe Manufacturers International.  Then, buy all the production, with taxpayers money, and use the knives to help the inner city ‘youth of America’.  With a new knife, a small stipend, (you don’t expect them to do this for free do ya?) and some basic instructions written in several languages in very small words, the Youth of America could go to slashing tires.  Think of the demand this would create for the tire manufacturers.  And tow trucks. And repair shops.  Pretty soon we will have slashed our way to prosperity and incidentally, re-election.

Once again I use the absurd to make a point:  It ain’t their money.