I hate economists, and this was an idea purported by some economist;

About ~677,000 cars were taken off the market.

Affecting the at the time amount of used car dealers and secondary market;

Which is felt to this day;

You have to understand, a small business that relies on goods, is going to be devastated by what could be viewed as a small change to the overall market.

This was during the time of the GFC 2008, when automobile industry had the bailouts, and they were desperate to spur economic growth to sustain themselves. As it turns out, people couldn’t afford homes and thus they weren’t buying cars, because they didn’t think that living in a car or a van was an option for a lot of them.

Before they failed after the bailouts, to spur growth, they went ahead and made a rebate program to buy back used cars that qualified and scrap em. They didn’t get put back onto the market, or refurbed or anything.

The Car engines were ruined with some chemicals to seize the engine, then they scrapped the cars entirely instead of gutting out the usable parts for resale or for other people to pick n pull.

The idea was that if we got rid of old cars, consumers would spend money in the consumerist cycle to buy new cars or ‘Certified Used/Pre Owned’. Stimulating the market demand and shit, or something.

What ended up happening, is a lot of old cars and vintage cars got canned and scrapped, instead of being supplied to a pick-n-pull to allow people and scalpers and rebuilders to get supply of good parts from old cars to fix up their junk. Now most people have to try to get OEM parts or get even ‘luckier’ at these scrap yards, resulting in them ending up selling their project car or letting it rust in their garage drive ways.

Essentially making a lot of old and used cars obsolete. It’s planned obsolescence.

The loss of many old cars resulted in job displacement for used car lots and lemon sellers and classic car retrofitters. People make their money off of products including second hand markets, and if the product is used cars, deleting a bunch of them from the system, results in less product, which means less market liquidity of trade in the used car market. Hurting the overall market that relied on clunkers.

shortly after 09, it was a bad deal for even the government and the auto market;

Resulting in other cases, more sales, which means more people had to spend money, meaning it’s good for the ‘new’ auto market but bad for the household consumer and secondary markets;

Which wouldn’t be much of a problem had most of the cars and car parts made in USA, but since a lot of things are imported, to include parts, this ended up hurting the overall economy.

That quote from above, bought mostly import cars;

Then newer cars had more technology and raised their prices to meet economic demands of inflation or -insert vague reason-, meaning the average car prices sky rocketed.

Which was later affected by things like the Clown Virus of 2020.

Resulting in a need for a robust supply chain of newer chips for ‘smarter technology’ in newer cars which due to supply chain issues raised inflation;

It also didn’t help with the FED and the US Treasury printing a fuck wad of money causing asset inflation in every market.

In all in all, the average used car price is high as fuck;

Vice;

people getting fucked;

The criterion for cash for clunkers was something like 25 year old or more cars.

Meaning we won’t really get normalized car prices for atleast 25 years or more unless we push for cheaper models like a ‘people’s car’. Price is made up anyway, and thus it currently floats high because it’s artificially made so.

If you’re interested in the artificial price manipulation of the car market, just look into Kelly Blue Book, and you’ll find your answer.

Anyways

The conspiracy in all of this is simple, Car Manufacturers lobbied to push this bill and get old cars out of the market to buy new cars. Creating an artificially induced gap in supply of old cars, destroying old car markets, and resulting in reliance in newer cars. Meaning More Money.

The other factor is that newer cars are easily totaled instead of repaired. That adds to the demand of newer cars. Crumple zones, air bags deployed, and more criterion judged by an assessor or Car Insurance Company, and now you gotta get a new car. Creating another money incentive for car manufacturers.

Oil and gas companies didn’t pay attention or something because their bottom line would be affected by the average miles per gallon being somewhat increased.

The deeper tinfoil hat is that the newer cars have better IR and facial recognition technology allowing for more Patriot act, NSA, and Government surveillance.

Probably the reason why we don’t allow many Chinese or Japanese cars in our markets, but somehow allow EU cars to sell their shit here, but not accept our shit there. Imports do not match the exports.

The IR technology in modern cars will light your face like a Christmas tree, but that’s only if you can see IR.

also, here’s a relevant video;

And here’s a twitter thread of complaints -reasonably so;

In Closing

The whole, you won’t own nothing and be sad. People can’t afford homes, and now cars are also on the chopping block. And if you pay attention to how roads and highway infrastructure is built in the US, with the lack of Public Transport, it’s evident that the oil barons designed it so that we’d be isolated and reliant on cars as a form of freedom and mobility.

No auto mobile company or bank or nation or even the Roman Empire is ‘too big’ to die. I think we ought to let em die and allow new industries to rise up and eventually become compliant to newer standards of safety. It’s insanely difficult to start up a new car company in this day and age, and that’s not good.

I’m not entirely a free market economics kinda guy, but anytime the government subsidizes one side of the trade, it fucks over the other. That’s an obvious fact when working in market dichotomies.

Asymmetrical trade and warfare result in economic pain.

Especially if you’re taking a temporal block of cars from 25 years and beyond. That’s a huge piece of history you’re practically creating a material genocide in the market. A Huge gap in the history and market of vehicles or any goods.

I mean, have you seen car prices nowadays? You’d spend 8k for something you used to be able to buy for 1k. It’s bonkers.

So, uh, the right amount of government intervention is ideally zero, the same amount of divine intervention, but we humans are stupid, and that’s when big brother steps in. And because Government isn’t God, well, they tend to do things that are more stupid.

That’s just how it is.

And we Americunts were dumb for falling prey to the get money quick scheme, trading and gaming our national auto market industry for a quick buck.

Well, atleast we still got multi-million dollar Catalytic converter theft schemes. That’s nice? I guess.

I got bored of writing and researching, so enjoy what’s here. There’s way more shit and nuance and you’d have to go back to the beginning of the universe to understand it, so I’ll end it here and pass the baton to some other Akashic record archiving schizo.

*Not Valid Financial, Legal, Life, or Any Advice