Where is My Piece of the Pie?

The government gave out money to irresponsible homebuyers to help bail them out of their bad mortgages.  But we were responsible and didn’t buy more house than we could afford, so we paid for our neighbor’s mortgage and continued paying for our own as well.

The government is giving money to people to buy new cars who would have bought one already if they could afford it. But we were responsible and chose cars with good gas milage that we could afford to pay for, so we are buying our neighbors a new car and driving our own responsible cars.

Where is our piece of the pie.. the government cheese?  Those of us who are responsible with our money, time and talent are giving more and more of our money over to a government who uses it to bail out those who were irresponsible.  When are we going to say enough and let these people fail?  Bad choices have bad consequences.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or Masters degree to understand that you have to have more money coming in than going out or you are screwed with a capital ‘S’.

And what about the thousands of cars that are being destroyed?  Some of them are fairly new.  These are perfectly good cars (seen that 2000 Volvo S80 video on YouTube?); and we’re removing them from circulation.  People who can’t afford new cars buy used cars.  And now they can’t buy these cars; heck, the government won’t even GIVE them away to people who can’t afford a new car.

The $4,500 is pretty dangerous too.  Let’s do some math.  I don’t have a Volvo, but I had to pick something because my Subaru’s gas mileage is too high.

Let’s say I have a Volvo S80 which the cars.gov site says gets 18mpg.  If I drive 90 miles per day, I’m paying $64.25 per week for gas, or an annual total of $3,341.  Forgetting the fact that I bought the Volvo because it’s got the highest crash safety ratings, is a wagon, and has AWD; I decide to trade it in.

To get the maximum payout, I have to buy something that gets 28mpg, so I pick the Ford Focus.  It’s relatively cheap, is only FWD, doesn’t haul all of my stuff, and completely doesn’t fit myneeds, but so what, we’re talking money, right?  The Focus gets 28mpg according to cars.gov, and costs $17,000 (minus $4,500 makes it $12,500).  At 90 miles per day, the Focus will cost me $41.12 per week in gas for an annual total of $2138.24 at current gas prices.

By buying the Focus, my annual gas savings are $1,202.76.  Pretty hefty sum, right?  Wrong.

Most people aren’t going to put on a down payment on the new car, because Obama is handling that for them.  The car payments (over 4 years) on the Focus will be about $320/month, for an annual total of $3,840.  That’s three times what I’m saving by getting better gas mileage.  That’s more than the entire annual total of gas I was purchasing for the Volvo. By trading in my perfectly good clunker, I’M LOSING $2637 PER YEAR.  Did I say that loud enough?  The Focus is costing me $5978 per year, which is $2637 more than the paid off clunker Volvo is costing me.  And that perfectly good paid off Volvo is now scrap metal.  I’m paying almost $3,000 in interest alone for the privilege of having my safe and mission-meeting Volvo scrapped.

I did these calculations with a Ford Focus; imagine how much worse it would be if I replaced it with a new Volvo!  I am deeply worried that the people who fall for this are getting themselves into payments that they can’t afford and will be causing a car loan crisis meltdown in a year or so.  Come on, people, wake up.  The government isn’t giving us anything for free.  It’s not free money — it has HUGE strings attached, and that doesn’t even take into account how much our taxes are going to go up in order to give you all of this “free” money for healthcare and cars and houses.

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