Category Archives: Auto Industry
Jet Setter
Chris Wallace famously asked Michelle Bachman if she were a “flake”.
Obama’s been called worse.
Tax breaks for corporate jets were included in the $800 billion stimulus package, right around the time auto execs were being slammed for arriving for congressional hearings in corporate jets. You can read about it here, here, or here.
Not only that, Bloomberg says it’s not even enough money to save student loans.
We’re All Investors Now
Republicans used to call it tax and spend. Now it’s mostly just spend. Democrats call it investing. For all the hope and change, things have stayed pretty much the same.
I drew this in 1992. 
Scrap Stimulus
Demand is up for used cars because people are poorer. Supply is down because last year’s Cash for Clunkers program turned used cars into scrap. The scrapped used car market was, according to George Will, “an important mechanism for redistributing wealth to low income persons”. In the Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby sums up the program as, “a deplorable exercise in budgetary wastefulness, asset destruction, environmental irrelevance, and economic idiocy”.
Voltwagon
Fredrich Hayek’s 1944 classic Road to Serfdom has become a best seller again. He said that governments tend to plan production for political, rather than market, purposes. Government owned GM’s new Volt costs $41,000, runs on a battery, and gets 40 miles per charge.
GM Pays You Back
GM paid off its TARP loan with money from its TARP escrow account, then used more of your money to buy ads to brag about it. Nick Gillespie explains on Reason TV.
