Column for Aug. 13, 2009

Are you enjoying helping other people buy their new cars?

Have you purchased a new car recently? If so, have you enjoyed either helping others buy their new cars? Or have you been enjoying others buying your car for you? With $3 billion now into this boondoggle, the "Cash for Clunkers" program has been in full swing. The automobile industry may love it, but as a taxpayer, I detest it.

Sorry people, but a new car is not a necessity, it is a luxury. Just because your car is older and may get a little worse gas mileage than you would prefer does not entitle you to government money.

I see nothing in the Constitution that gives the government the power to authorize such expenditure of public money. And yet we are paying for people to have the luxury of a new car.

One part of the Cash for Clunkers catastrophe that falls under the “law of unintended consequences” is (as I just read) that the price of new cars is being driven up because of the lack of a need to discount prices to attract customers.

A second consequence is that the cars traded in for new ones have to be destroyed under the law. Good, older used cars will not be available to the less fortunate or those who do not have the budget for something newer. As long as the populace in general is getting hosed on such a boondoggle, lawmakers could have had the charitable foresight to give away these used cars to the less fortunate. At least then, welfare recipients without a car could wake up before noon and have transportation to go find a job.

The original Cash for Clunkers program was supposed to last all summer and only require a $1 billion budget. Now they are two billion dollars over their original budget. Are we sure that we want the same people who could not run such a simple program like this to be in charge of our health care system, as well?

What is the bottom line purpose behind the Car Allowance Rebate System (Cash for Clunkers, as it is called)? Control. When more money is taken out of your pocket and redistributed, it is control over your life. If you look to the government as your supply, then you will tend to re-elect those who gave you money. This principle transcends all levels of government. Follow the money trail and it always shows the hidden agenda.

To continue on the idea of a hidden agenda, I was watching a news report that users of the Car Allowance Rebate System web site (CARS.gov) must agree to a term of use that says you agree to give up ownership of your computer. You actually have to agree to the fine print stating that your computer has become part of a government computer network and that the computer is now under the ownership of the US Government.

A software application gets installed on your computer and you agree that all files on your computer are accessible by the government. Hey, I don’t make this stuff up. I just report what I have read and seen.

I don’t know about you, but that is just Big Brother at work. For the $4,500 or so in the form of a rebate, I am not willing to totally relinquish my cyber privacy and allow any jack booted brown shirt to come from the government to claim my personal property as that of the government.

One way to ponder the $3 billion for CARS is that though it is a pittance compared to the overall national budget, it is huge when put into perspective locally. The $3 billion is 15.789 percent of our entire North Carolina state budget.

We certainly would not have a $900 million tax increase with that sort of money added to our state budget instead of being blown on new cars. Also, more people would have directly benefited. Three billion dollars is 174.446729115106755 times the entire annual town of Selma budget.

Before I pop a blood vessel thinking about how our tax dollars are being spent, I need to wrap up this week’s column.