The Great American Auto Boondoggle

PUBLISHED:  OCTOBER 2009

The Great American Auto Boondoggle

The American Motorists is making a serious mistake… yet again. 

Back in the seventies, when the so-called fuel shortage occurred, Americans began trading the big cars in for those little gas sipping rattletraps from overseas and later from the American automakers.  As it turned out they were fairly good on gas mileage… if you didn’t mind giving up safety, and comfort, which the standard sized American car afforded.

In time, the gas shortage was seen for what it really was… a hoax… and gas stations, again, had plenty of gasoline.  But the American motorists had a pile of junk on his hands.  That is… those who survived car crashes in those tiny little things.

Already, I’m seeing ads in papers for SUV’s, and Standard, as well as the Mid-sized, American cars on sale, with prices drastically cut, some thousands of dollars off the price they’d normally bring on the market.  Dealers are frightened they will be stuck with the large cars, and trucks, and they’re practically giving them away to cut what they see as losses coming down the road aways.

Now, having said all this… let me say, if you own an SUV, or a standard size automobile, or Pick-up… keep it.  At least you’ll be safe in a car crash.  Families with small children should keep their SUV’s for the safety of their families, too.

I have a Pick-up and my wife has a standard sized four-door sedan.  We plan to keep them.  My daughter has one of the largest, if not the largest SUV’s on the market today.  She also has two small children, one an infant.  That vehicle affords a margin of safety for her, and for her children, that those little beer cans, on wheels, will never provide.  So it costs more to fuel up.  How can you put a price on the safety of your family, how?

Those little cars, as we have learned, were death traps in a collision with a standard sized vehicle or truck (including SUVs).  Reducing the speed limit didn’t do much other than make motorist angry, add to the road rage, and make lots of money, from speeding tickets, for the states and municipalities.

Now, remember what we learned from the 70’s and 80’s when the market was flooded with those little toy cars: the owners were so angry, that some of us did not downsize as they did, they tried to put a guilt trip on all the owners of standard sized cars, and trucks, claiming that when your standard size vehicle hit theirs, in a collision, people tended to get killed in the little car.  Well, that was true, but the people in the standard sized vehicle survived! 

The point I’m trying to make is that the decision to buy one of those tiny death traps has a price, not shown on the sticker.  That is the price of your life and the lives of your families. 

The hybrids coming out onto the market today will be featured in the Smithsonian before too many decades are past.  The technology is not new; it’s just newly applied. 

We need more refineries in this country, built away from the immediate coasts.  We need them badly.  We have oil.  We just have no way to refine enough to meet today’s demands.  As soon as we get new refineries built, and the newly refined petroleum products begin to hit the market… watch OPEC”S prices drop like a stone… and their production increase.

Finally, we do need to begin serious research into an alternative for oil when it does run out. That is still many, many, decades down the road, but we need the research started now.

Until that day arrives we have no real choice but to use what we have.  What we have is oil.  Be safe, drive your big truck, or car.  Drive less, if necessary, but think of your safety and the safety of your family.

J. D. Longstreet 

The US is Committing National Suicide ... Alan Caruba

The US is Committing National Suicide

By Alan Caruba

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Growing up as a teenager in the 1950s, I could not wait to get my license to drive and I liked the sporty look of the British MG. These days I drive a Volkswagen. In that short tale can be found the seeds of the end of the American auto industry.

Here’s some history. In 1952, the merger of several British auto companies resulted in the British Motor Corporation. It was the largest of its day with 39% of British output. Despite established dealerships for the various models, a series of poor management decisions resulted in the loss of market share.

By 1968, British Leyland was formed out of British Motor Corporation and became British Leyland Motor Corporation Ltd. In 1975, it was partially nationalized and the government became a holding company. UK market share barely changed and despite brands such as Jaguar, Rover and Land Rover, the government motor company continued its decline.

By 2005, the MG Rover Group went bankrupt, bringing to an end the production by British owned companies. The MG became part of Chinese Nanjing Automobile.

The 1970s were difficult economic times for the United Kingdom and its Labor government (1974-1979), as noted above, created a holding company with the government as the major shareholder. At that point British Leyland employed 159,000 people in its many divisions that included a bus and truck operation.

In 1984, Jaguar Cars became independent once more through a public sale of its shares, but the Leyland truck and bus operation was sold to Volvo in 1988. The Rover Group was sold by the government to British Aerospace that in turn sold it to BMW. Suffice it to say, the British auto industry is now largely owned by companies in other nations or operating as a mere shadow of its former self.

Anyone who thinks that General Motors will revive is wrong. As Larry Kudlow, the radio-TV business maven, recently wrote, “Taxpayers won’t get their money back” and that figure now stands at $50 billion.

Both GM and Chrysler should have been allowed to choose bankruptcy months ago, but the U.S. government in its infinite wisdom has thrown our money down a rat hole created by bad management and excessive labor union demands over the past four decades. Meanwhile, as was the case in the UK, Chrysler is now owned by an Italian auto manufacturer.

The U.S. government now owns GM, AIG an insurance company, and billions in housing mortgages through the government entities of Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae. Kudlow said, “We’re talking about hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars that will never be repaid.”

That news is bad enough, but consider now that the U.S. government has just increased the standards of how much mileage must be achieved from a gallon of gasoline at the very same time it demands that more of that gasoline be mixed with ethanol. Ethanol reduces mileage. President Obama has already made clear that he wants GM to manufacture “green” automobiles. No one will buy them.

The Telegraph, a British newspaper, recently did the math on the price of “green” cars, noting that the present UK models cost the equivalent of more than about $5,000 US. “To benefit from the difference in fuel efficiency, you would have to drive 198,000 miles, the equivalent of driving around the world eight times.” The same will apply to comparable American-made “green” cars.

Here in America, the biofuels industry receives a 45-cent tax credit for every gallon of ethanol or biodiesel it produces or about $3 billion a year. The US government requires that 10% of all gasoline be blended with these biofuels whether consumers want it or not. This mandate is scheduled to double by 2015.

Not only will the automobiles cost more and get less mileage per gallon, but the Congressional Budget Office last month reported that “the increased use of ethanol accounted for about 10% to 15% of the rise in food prices.” That’s because the main ingredient of ethanol is corn. That is insane.

At the same time, the government refuses to permit exploration and extraction of known oil reserves in the nation’s interior and off its continental coastal shelf despite estimates of literally billions of barrels of untapped oil.

In the Bakken Formation under North Dakota and Montana, there are an estimated 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil. And we’re not even talking about the billions of barrels off the coast of California, Florida and other coastal states. The U.S. by some estimates has eight times as much oil as Saudi Arabia, eighteen times as much as Iraq and twenty-two times as much oil as Iran.

There is one, single reason why we can’t get at those oil and natural gas reserves, as well as being denied access to the massive amounts of U.S. coal reserves. It is the environmental organizations that maintain a campaign against energy use in the nation.

The government is to blame, of course, but you can thank Greenpeace USA, Friends of the Earth, the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the United Nations Environmental Program, among countless others that have fought against any and all development, any and all economic expansion and growth.

This campaign is coming to a head with a “Cap-and-Trade” bill making its way through Congress that would impose a huge tax on “greenhouse gas emissions” by every industry and business that produces or uses energy. It has no scientific justification. Even the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Transportation and Air Quality has released a study demonstrating that the reduction of CO2 emissions would be minimal at best, but such reductions are absurd because there is no global warming.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the midst of a historic economic crisis, at a time when such emissions will continue in other nations around the world, and when such emissions are known to have no effect whatever on a totally bogus “global warming” or “climate change” is a program for national suicide.

Government control of the auto industry is now merely a prelude to its eventual end. Jobs will disappear forever. “Green jobs” are a myth. The economy will suffer a grievous loss. And, if you draw the lessons from the British experiment, you can accurately predict the future of our auto industry.

Only if control of Congress by the Democrats is ended can measures be taken that will permit the nation to turn away from the destruction being inflicted upon it. Vote in October 2010 as if your life, your children’s lives, and your grandchildren’s lives depend upon it, because it does.

Alan Caruba writes a daily blog at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com and a weekly commentary at http://www.anxietycenter.com, the website of The National Anxiety Center.

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Global+Warming+Hoax+Oil+Cars+Nationalization

Small Cars Can Kill You!

Small Cars Can Kill You!

USA Government Accepts Trade-off
J. D. Longstreet

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Buying that small car to save money on gasoline may end up costing you your life in exchange for that few dollars saved on fuel.

In a car crash, a driver is twice as likely to die in a small car as in a midsize car. Please note that the mid-size car is just one step up the size scale. So make the small cars safer, you say. Well, it can be done, but that will increase the weight of the car and, again, reduce the gas mileage. It all comes down to the Law of Physics. Here’s an example I saw on a site some time ago: Pit a 2,000 pound VW Rabbit against a 6,000 pound Hummer - and the Hummer wins every time. 53% of small-car deaths back in 2005 involved only small cars. Either a single small car crashed into something such as a guardrail or tree or two small cars crashed into each other, according to the NHTSA data. Learn more HERE.

In an article from the Wall Street Journal site titled: “Small Cars are Dangerous Cars” it is stated: “The death rate in minis in multi-vehicle crashes is almost twice as high as that of large cars. And in single-vehicle crashes, where there's no oversized second vehicle to blame, the difference is even greater: Passengers in minis suffered three times as many deaths as in large cars.” You’ll find the article HERE.

It surely seems as if there is a concerted effort to keep this information quiet. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) is trying to get this information out to the auto buying public. Hardly anyone or any other organization is, however. Why? Answer: the government.

Back in 2002 a “National Research Council study found that the federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards contributed to about 2,000 deaths per year through their restrictions on car size and weight. But amazingly, with the exception of IIHS, there's practically no one else providing information on the size-safety issue” (Follow up HERE.) Where is the: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and/or the Environmental Protection Agency, on this issue? They are unusually quiet. Could it be no one wants to rock the boat? No one wants to admit the emperor has no clothes.

The government is insisting on better gas mileage across the fleet of American cars. Today’s technology will only allow automakers to reduce the weight of the car in an attempt to reach those gas mileage figures. Oh, sure, there are some other things the automaker can do, but even then nothing much happens - except the price of the auto goes up.

Look, our feeling is that if an American wants to drive a small car he/she should be able to buy it and drive it. On the other hand if he/she wants to own and drive a large car or truck, he/she should be able to do that, as well. But, now the nanny government, the socialist government of the left, has all but taken complete control of the car making business in America and they will dictate what is placed in the showrooms for you to choose from. Obama, the new socialist president of America, has said he will insist those automakers make “green cars” Translated that means, with today’s technology, tiny little plastic and aluminum cars with outer skins not much thicker than a beer can.

So, let’s get real for a moment. Americans, for the most part, don’t like tiny little cars. So, they are going to drag their heels at buying the things when they first hit the showrooms. All that money the American taxpayer shelled out to bailout the automakers will be lost. Every penny will be gone. But, the government is not going to relent on producing those tiny little coffins on wheels. But the question remains -how to force the American public to buy them? That is the burning question. The answer is simple. Raise the federal taxes on gasoline until the per gallon price of gasoline reaches 6, 7, 8, or even 10 dollars a gallon - and keep the per gallon price artificially high and that will drive the American car buying public into those pregnant roller skates that government motors calls cars.

Well, America, the Flower Children are in charge and they show almost as much sense as they did in their heyday back in the ‘60’s. Back then, facts were annoying little things that just got in the way of their feelings. In that, they have not changed.

Common sense, which is certainly not common anymore, says small cars will get more people killed on the American highways. The Flower Children in our government had much rather save the environment (which, by the way, is in no danger from mankind) than save the lives of fellow human beings. How much sense does that make? None. But it doesn’t have to make sense if it makes you feel good. Keep that in mind when dealing with our Hippie Government and it will help you understand what is going on in Washington these days.

J. D. Longstreet

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Conservative+Small+Cars+Highway+Death