Re: First they came for the clunkers......

Posted by Loyd Smith On 2009/1/21 1:23:59

Portlandon wrote:

"The "Clunker Bill" shows a lack of understanding of "sustainability." The environmental cost associated with building a new vehicle outweigh the savings associated with increasing your fuel consumption by anything but an astronomically high number (think 150%). So unless people are trading in old Suburbans for Vespas, you'll be hurting the environment more than helping it. The one benefit is the auto industry stimulus that would occur from added sales. However, it would be a one-time hit -- not a real solution to the many things that really ail the industry."

Speaking of "sustainability", consider the following:

The Department of Energy was created in 1977 to, "DECREASE OUR DEPENDENCE ON FOREIGN OIL." Last year, 31 years later, its annual budget was $24.2 BILLIONS, it had 16,000 permanent federal employees and 100,000 private contract employees.

Have we gotten noticeably less dependent upon foreign oil?

Pretty efficient, huh?

This is the point where anyone with prior knowledge and the ability to add two and two together to get four would be slapping their foreheads and asking themselves, "What was I thinking?"

Instead, we're in the process of turning what remains of our banking industry and our auto industry over to a bunch of similarly forward-thinking bureaucrats.

I'd feel a lot better about the sustainability of the human race if we didn't just keep doing the same thing over and over and over and over and over again - all the while expecting a different result.

My Packard is sustainable as far as I'm concerned. I won't pollute the atmosphere as much with it nearly as much as the congressmen, senators, corporate executives and sustainability, "experts," flying around in their corporate jets and building plants to produce grossly overpriced merchandise that won't last until it's paid for if I drive it for another 40 years - unless we see fit to create yet another bureaucracy to, "regulate," it for, "environmental," purposes. How, "sustainable," in the overall scheme of industry and economy is another self-serving, non-productive giant bureaucracy?