Did You Just Hear Something Go "CLUNK"?

I was awakened this morning by the sound of one of my wife's flower vases falling and smashing on the tile floor of the bathroom. Just a couple hours later I heard a much louder crash, actually more of a "clunk," as a new report came out assigning a shocking price tag to the automobiles sold this summer in the governments misguided "Cash for Clunkers" program. Yesterday I dismissed that program as a gimmick at best, and now it appears it was far worse than a gimmick, it was another costly blunder by a government determined to get its hands all over, well pretty much everything.

You remember the come-ons from summer, don't you. Bring in your "clunker" and we'll give you up to $4500 in government money for it towards your purchase of a new car. Unfortunately, with the dust settled, and the opportunity to examine the numbers, it turns out that the net cost to taxpayers per new car purchase in the Cash for Clunkers program was a littler higher than $4500--try $24,000. Ouch! That means your $15,000 Hyundai really cost almost $40K. Why for that kind of money you could have bought yourself a Ford Taurus. But, and here's some bitter irony, most of the clunkers that were traded in actually went towards the purchase of those Hyundais and other foreign cars. So, like so many American jobs, most of the Cash for Clunkers cash headed overseas. The clunks keep getting louder.

And they won't be stopping anytime soon. Here's another big clunk for you. Another quarter of a million Americans filed for unemployment in September. Funny, I would have thought that would have been a loud enough crash to get someone's attention in Washington, but instead the word from D.C. is that the recession is over. Hmm. I think that for some reason those pronouncements of a recovery are not going to convince the 10+ million out of work Americans that happy days are here again.

The auto industry, tottering on the brink of complete collapse, needed to rebuild its foundation. The governments answer was to pull up with a truck full of sand and say, "Here you go, Detroit. Build on this." (Billions of bailout dollars and the awful Cash for Clunkers program) Jesus predicted what happens whenever you build on a poor foundation, the whole structure ends up collapsing (Matthew 7:24-27). Well, if Detroit keeps looking to Washington, and Washington continues to respond by delivering more sand, it won't be long before we will witness the complete and final fall of the American auto industry, and great will that fall be.