Does It Come with Floormats?

Good news if you are a member of the UAW or like those Howie Long truck ads that pollute NFL games on Sunday, the Senate, which is supposed to be the thoughtful side of the Congress, thoughtfully added an 11 billion dollar income tax write-off for the interest and sales tax for anyone who wants to buy a new car - seriously. When I read that I really thought that the ever foxy Senator Barbara Mikulski was kidding. By the way, check out her official Senate page where she has a tab that says "How Can I Help You?" Grrrrrooooowwwwllllll. Absolutely schedule a meeting Senator!

Let's do the math shall we? First, a Republican President decided to give the Big Three 17.4 billion dollars, and I know we are all a little numb from the numbers being kicked around lately, but visually that's $17,400,000,000. That was supposed to last a couple of months. I mean, Mrs. Fundman couldn't go through that much money in a couple of months.

Now they were supposed to come up with a plan to get out of this mess by this month, but they just had the worst January in decades and Chrysler is already saying they need another 3 billion bucks.

The government, the people who couldn't estimate how many fingers I have, are currently projecting that this auto sales perk would cost another 11 billion dollars. Let's say GM is gonna need another 7 billion or so. That puts us at almost 40 billion dollars - for three companies.

Now before I continue, let me remind you this plan is for ALL CARS over 25,000 dollars. So the government will not only be subsidizing buying a Malibu, it will also be subsidizing buying this, and this, and even this.

Moreover, this subsidy to go out and buy more cars comes from the same Barbara Mikulski who voted to increase CAFE standards just a year ago. Now she wants to subsidize rednecks and piston heads buying Hummers and Dodge Trucks with Viper engines.

Car dealers and politicians seem to think that this little plan will encourage "hesitant" buyers onto car lots. You wanna know why people are "hesitant" to buy American cars, aside from the fact that American cars are lousy? It's because they are too busy worrying about losing their jobs, homes, and health insurance. CONGRESS SHOULD NOT BE ENCOURAGING PEOPLE LIKE THAT TO TAKE ON YET MORE DEBT FOR A FIFTH CAR! I mean I thought everyone was in agreement that we had too much debt and that taking on FRIGGIN CAR LOANS when the entire county was tapped out was sort of like sending Keith Richards heroin while he's in re-hab.

Senator, and just about every other member of the Congress, if you want to spend lots of our money on wasteful government projects and Keynesian stimulus, ok. I don't like it, strongly suspect most of it will end up being wasted, and would much rather just be issued a check of my own money. But please, do not additionally encourage my fellow citizens to go out and take on even more debt. We're done; shut down the buffet; we all could use a little debt diet.