So my mom has been wanting a new car for a while. Being a teacher in Florida and having just put one son through college (me) and my brother going into his junior year at FSU, she's been trying to wait for the right time.
Now my mom is a liberal poster child. A public school teacher and union member with a Master's degree, the blood in our family runs pretty blue. So she's been looking into taking advantage of the Cash for Clunkers (CARS) program.
Every night this week she's being getting on her laptop and researching various car models to see if their mileages would be enough of an improvement over that of her '02 3.2L V6 Dodge Caravan to qualify.
Then comes this last Friday, she goes to get her headlight fixed by our family mechanic. This guy has fixed our family's cars for forever. My dad coached his son in middle school soccer. We bought my first truck from him. This guy loved my dad. We still joke that that he cried louder than my mom at dad's funeral.
And he's a total wingnut. Big Palin 2012 sign in front of his shop. FAUX News on all day in his office, Glenn Beck on the radio, yadda yadda. But the dude knows cars. So he inherited most of the auto maintenance duties for my family after dad died.
On Friday, he's fixing my mom's blown out headlight and she asks him about Cash for Clunkers. And he tells her its a rip-off. "Around this time of year the car companies are trying to liquidate this year's models to make room for the 2010's, so they'd give you about $4500 in saving anyways, plus the further price slashes going on right now." And so my mom was convinced. Hasn't said a word about it since. I know jack-all about car buying and pricing cycles, but I also know this guy has an ideological incentive in seeing everything Obama and the Democrats do fail. Last time I was in there he and one of his mechanics had a chuckling rapport about stimulus jobs, as in, "Stimulus jobs, yeah right!" There is much evidence here that he has absorbed more stupid from the Noise Machine on this topic.
But despite his wingnuttiness, he's been a rather pragmatic guy on automotive issues and what he says has that ring of truthiness thats so damn dangerous. I guess what I'm getting at is, how is this guy wrong? What do I say to debunk this stuff? Even though I'm a diehard Kossack (picked the Big Man himself up from the airport once during his 1st book tour) I have to have the intellectual honesty to entertain the possibility that he may be right.
So how about it guys? Is my family mechanic right about what we've been hailing as gov't's most recent smash hit program being a bottle of snake oil? Don't let me down kids.