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Mark Steyn has more on the rollout.
… We are assured by the headline writers that the president was “unaware” of Obamacare’s website defects, and the National Security Agency spying, and the IRS targeting of his political enemies, and the Justice Department bugging the Associated Press, and pretty much anything else you ask him about. But, as he put it, “nobody’s madder than me” at this shadowy rogue entity called the “Government of the United States” that’s running around pulling all this stuff.
And, once he finds out who’s running this Government of the United States rogue entity, he’s gonna come down as hard on him as he did on that video-maker in California; he’s gonna send round the National Park Service SWAT Team to teach that punk a lesson he won’t forget.
Gloria Borger and CNN seem inclined to swallow the line that the president of the United States is not aware that he is president of the United States: for the media, just a spoonful of manure makes the Obamacare medicine go down. It remains to be seen whether the American citizenry will be so genially indulgent. Hitherto, most of what the president claims to be unaware of, they are genuinely unaware of: few people have plans to vacation in Benghazi, or shoot the breeze with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on her cell phone. But Obamacare is different: whether or not the president is unaware of it, the more than two million Americans (at the time of writing) kicked off their current healthcare plans are most certainly aware of it. …
… But that’s life in the Republic of Paperwork, isn’t it? The remorseless diversion of time and energy to “futzing around.” That’s why so much of American life seems to be seizing up, why so many routine features of human existence require time-consuming bureaucracy-heavy painstaking navigation (to borrow a term from Obamacare’s “customer-service representatives”).
America would benefit from an opposition party that offered a serious de-futzing of the nation: a platform on the scale of Mrs. Thatcher’s privatization program in 1979 or Sir Roger Douglas’ in New Zealand in the Eighties that offered to make ordinary life comprehensible to non-wonks once more.
Instead, the Obama crowd have bet that, after the usual whining, you’ll settle down and get used to it: higher co-pays, higher premiums, higher deductibles, higher mountain of paperwork, higher futzing. But the fact remains that nowhere in the western world has the governmentalization of health care been so incompetently introduced and required protection by such a phalanx of lies.
Obamacare is not a left/right issue; it’s a fraud issue.
Remember Cash for Clunkers? The administration brags on that. But the Brookings Institution, a left wing think tank, says it too was a failure. Seth Mandel at Contentions has the story.
The ongoing debacle that is the administration’s rollout of ObamaCare has reignited debate about technocracy and big-government liberalism. But Democrats who worry that their mode of coercive politics will be discredited by ObamaCare should be thankful it took this long.
A very well-timed reminder of this arrived yesterday from the Brookings Institution. Scholars at the left-leaning think tank analyzed the so-called “Cash for Clunkers” program, the 2009 “stimulus” program intended to get cleaner cars on the road by providing cash vouchers for those who trade in older gas guzzlers and buy newer, more efficient cars. The administration patted itself on the back when the program ran out of money, apparently pleasantly surprised that people took free money during an economic downturn. But Brookings confirms that this was, of course, a terrible program. Here are their major findings:
The $2.85 billion program provided a short-term boost in vehicle sales, but the small increase in employment came at a far higher implied cost per job created ($1.4 million) than other fiscal stimulus programs, such as increasing unemployment aid, reducing employers’ and employees’ payroll taxes, or allowing the expensing of investment costs.
Total emissions reduction was not substantial because only about half a percent of all vehicles in the United States were the new, more energy-efficient CARS vehicles.
The program resulted in a small gasoline reduction equivalent only to about 2 to 8 days’ worth of current usage.
In terms of distributional effects, compared to households that purchased a new or used vehicle in 2009 without a voucher, CARS program participants had a higher before-tax income, were older, more likely to be white, more likely to own a home, and more likely to have a high-school and a college degree.
That last part just seems like pouring salt in the left’s wounds. Not only was the program a massive failure, but it was also, by the way, a taxpayer-funded subsidy for white homeowners– …
Seth is a free marketer. What does the liberal Washington Post say about Cash for Clunkers? They say, “Almost anything would have been better stimulus than ‘Cash for Clunkers.’”
When the Obama administration first proposed its “cash for clunkers” plan in 2009, the reaction was generally favorable. Congress would spend $2.85 billion to encourage drivers to swap their old gas-guzzlers for newer, more fuel-efficient cars.
The program had something for everyone: It would lend a hand to the ailing U.S. auto industry. It would tamp down on oil consumption. And, once launched, the program proved so popular with consumers that it burned through $1 billion in its first five days. Sure, a few critics argued that the program wouldn’t be very cost-effective, but no one was really listening.
But, as it turns out, the critics were on to something. A new analysis from the Brookings Institution’s Ted Gayer and Emily Parker found that the program was fairly inefficient as economic stimulus and mostly pulled forward auto sales that would have happened anyway. It also cut greenhouse-gas emissions a bit — the equivalent of taking up to 5 million cars off the road for a year — but at a steep cost.
“Cash for Clunkers” wasn’t good stimulus
Gayer and Parker find that Americans traded in nearly 700,000 old cars (“clunkers”) through the program between July 1 and Aug. 24, 2009. Vehicle sales did rise during that period. But a detailed study suggests that consumers just bought some cars slightly earlier than they otherwise would have. Cumulative purchases over the year were basically unchanged: …
We posted on Cash for Clunkers four years ago in August 2009. Here’s Andy McCarthy from last August 2009.
Compared to the infinite complexity of healthcare and health-insurance, cash-for-clunkers is kindergarten stuff. You trade in your old car for a new one that gets (slightly) better mileage and the government gives you money — between $3500 and $4500. How hard is that?
Pretty hard, apparently. The Washington Times reports this morning that this simple, basic Big Gummint program has spun totally out of control: it was clearly not thought through (even a little), it was under-budgeted by 2 or 3 hundred percent (and counting), and it was woefully under-resourced — such that staff have to be hired from the outside or pulled away from other government functions (like running air-traffic control) in order to clear the back-log. Clearing the back-log, by the way, is a 24/7 operation that’s also requiring additional budgeting for overtime pay and a training program. …
…All this from the people who, Mark Steyn reminds us this morning, tell you that the way to control healthcare costs is to set up a huge new entitlement program (even as the ones they’ve already set up sink deeper into a multi-trillion dollar sea of unfunded liabilities). Why do we trust them to do anything other than the very few things for which you actually need a government? …
Volokh Conspiracy links to a You Tube short on The Death Throes of A Corvette. The idiots of the obama administration are proud of the fact they had a program that ruined 700,000 cars and made used cars more expensive for the people they claim they want to help.
Ed Morrissey in a post, also from four years ago, says the big winners in the program were foreign auto makers.
The Obama administration spent three billion dollars subsidizing the destruction of 700,000 vehicles in order to boost car sales. Which auto makers actually benefited from these American tax subsidies? Reuters reports that foreign car manufacturers gained market share, while the two bailed-out American automakers lost significant portions of theirs in the big summer sale. …
… Both GM and Chrysler had curtailed their production during their bankruptcies but had worked to have inventory ready for the new sales year. By launching C4C in the middle of the summer, when most dealers are already cutting prices to move inventory off the lot, the administration practically guaranteed that C4C would leave them on the sidelines. Chrysler had the worst inventory problems, but GM also had serious inventory issues. Ford, which didn’t take the bailout, had continued production and had inventory ready to sell.
Shouldn’t the owner of GM and Chrysler had known this? Didn’t anyone on the Auto Task Force — say, Ron Bloom, the auto czar with no automaking experience — bother to check whether their companies were ready to compete in this program, and whether July was a smart time to launch this even apart from that? This is what happens when government enters the private sector; it makes decisions based on politics rather than sound business sense, and it picks leaders based on cronyism and political payoffs rather than expertise and competence.