Wanna Buy Some Government Cheese?

This administration is so incompetent that it's getting hard to take them seriously. They, along with a stooge-esque Congress, spent most of today scrambling around trying to keep the albatross in the air.

The details are so simple. The government would give you a $3500-4500 credit if you brought in a gas guzzler and traded it in for a new, gas efficient model. They would then destroy the gas guzzler. The government set aside one billion dollars for the effort.

After four days the program was suspended. Then restarted, then suspended then who the hell knows. By the end of the day, Congress was calling for billions out of TARP money to make the program stable.

What could have caused such a commotion? The program was too much of a success!

The computer clearing system designed to approve/reject applications crashed leaving dealers unable to proceed.

Dealers who could submit applications were waiting for responses that just continued to backlog.

The rules proved idiotic as cars 15 years+ older didn't qualify for the program.

And the biggest joke of the whole ordeal? The government couldn't figure out how much money was spent or had been committed to be spent.

They couldn't keep track of a measly billion dollars.
They couldn't keep track of a relatively small group of peoples paperwork. Small as compared to other government agencies.

In short, the government proved incapable of administering even the simplest of programs without massive confusion, backlogs and bureaucracy that led to a double or tripling of the cost.

The good news? This proves yet again that the best stimulus is money in the peoples hands, not doled out to government cronies. Can we all say tax cuts/incentives, etc.? Imagine how well we'd be doing if we had across the board tax cuts and spending freezes at the beginning of the recession. It'd be over by now.

The bad? This program only exists because: 1) Obama wants to throw yet another bone to his friends at the UAW and 2) This is all part of a grand scheme of Obama's to get you to drive little crappy microcars like they do in Europe. Even a program cloaked under the veil of consumer interest is really just a tactic to alter your behavior forever.

All that is trivial compared to the real message sent loud and clear; that the government can't manage anything properly.

They can't keep track of a billion dollars, how about trillions.
They can't approve or decline a thousands of applications for credit, how about tens and hundred of millions of highly detailed digital records?
They can't design a website that can be used. Remember the crashed mortgage assistance website, another debacle. Think they can build a reliable one if your life depended on it?

Any reasonable person should conclude that they can't do any of these things and aside from the constitutional issues, this is reason enough not to let them anywhere near healthcare. Imagine the disaster when every Americans records get digitized and processed by the gov. Yikes.

Luckily, there are companies that process these types of records every single day, approving credit, filing paperwork, tracking the flow of money etc. There are occasional hiccups but remarkably few considering the amount of data tracked. We need these people desperately but who could they be?

It's called the private sector and it works every time. You know it, I know it, Obama surely knows it, so why won't he use it?

Because his goals aren't our goals. They aren't even what he says his goals are. He doesn't give a crap about actually ending the recession. Not until he has fundamentally changed the economic system of this nation.

So when Obama forms a committee to examine what went wrong or appoints Dealin Doug or Diamond Jim Brady as the new federal Used Car and Pawn Czar, just file it away and remeber that your being lied to by the Keystone Kops of politics. Next election is in in 2010.