This is a great peice from the Wall Street Journal that is worth passing on. Enjoy!

Remember “cash for clunkers,” the program that subsidized Americans to the tune of nearly $3 billion to buy a new car and destroy an old one? Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood declared in August that, “This is the one stimulus program that seems to be working better than just about any other program.”

If that’s true, heaven help the other programs. Last week U.S. automakers reported that new car sales for September, the first month since the clunker program expired, sank by 25% from a year earlier. Sales at GM and Chrysler fell by 45% and 42%, respectively. Ford was down about 5%. Some 700,000 cars were sold in the summer under the program as buyers received up to $4,500 to buy a new car they would probably have purchased anyway, so all the program seems to have done is steal those sales from the future. Exactly as critics predicted.

Cash for clunkers had two objectives: help the environment by increasing fuel efficiency, and boost car sales to help Detroit and the economy. It achieved neither. According to Hudson Institute economist Irwin Stelzer, at best “the reduction in gasoline consumption will cut our oil consumption by 0.2 percent per year, or less than a single day’s gasoline use.” Burton Abrams and George Parsons of the University of Delaware added up the total benefits from reduced gas consumption, environmental improvements and the benefit to car buyers and companies, minus the overall cost of cash for clunkers, and found a net cost of roughly $2,000 per vehicle. Rather than stimulating the economy, the program made the nation as a whole $1.4 billion poorer.

The basic fallacy of cash for clunkers is that you can somehow create wealth by destroying existing assets that are still productive, in this case cars that still work. Under the program, auto dealers were required to destroy the car engines of trade-ins with a sodium silicate solution, then smash them and send them to the junk yard. As the journalist Henry Hazlitt wrote in his classic, “Economics in One Lesson,” you can’t raise living standards by breaking windows so some people can get jobs repairing them.

In the category of all-time dumb ideas, cash for clunkers rivals the New Deal brainstorm to slaughter pigs to raise pork prices. The people who really belong in the junk yard are the wizards in Washington who peddled this economic malarkey.

It’s happened; President Obama has successfully vilified the rich and well-to-do.  Who cares if they struggled, went to school, worked their asses off and earned what they got, his message is clear:  Rich people = Republicans and Republicans = Evil People.  Therefore, logically speaking, the rich should pay for everything because they are bloodthirsty savages who rape and pillage our country for their own personal gain.

Before I continue, I am NOT a rich white guy.  I am a middle class white guy who grew up in a lower middle class family and put himself through school.  Now I get to watch as the entire country has “I hate people who have the means to help themselves” syndrome thanks for Obama’s campaign of “rich people have the money let them foot the bill”. 

First off, lets dispel the myth that the more you make the less you pay in taxes.  I don’t know where the hell this came from but the more you make the higher your tax percentage goes up and the more the rich pay in taxes.  If the rich did pay less of a percentage in taxes, than why would the democrats be so hell bent of NOT having a flat tax. 

President Obama, after achieving a “Hate The Rich” mentality, has started writing checks full well knowing that the most prosperous will foot the bill.  Cash for Clunkers is disguised as a way to help the American car industry, and it may do so, but where do you think that money is coming from?  The government will turn around and have to find money for the soon to be $3 billion dollar legislative bill.  Where is the health care reform money come from?  Who is going to pay for the February spending..err…stimulus bill that totaled over $800 billion?  BTW, where the hell are all the shovels we were suppose to see and jobs that were suppose to be created.  Oh yeah, in AIG’s pocket thanks for Chris Dodd, Tim Geithner, and President Obama.

This country better wake the hell up and realize that spending money and taxing those who are in a better financial situation is stupid, irresponsible, and yes, UNAMERICAN. 

President Abraham Lincoln said it best:

- You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
- You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
- You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
- You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down.
- You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
- You cannot build character and courage by taking away people’s initiative and independence.
- You cannot help people permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.