Budget talks: This is getting nasty

YF, as much as you work with your hands, you need a new ride. The first time you split your knuckles open trying to take the battery cables off an Alero, you will invent profanity for the occasion.

 

Depends on what you are using your vehicle for. Right now, I'm doing mostly administrative work, so my motivation to have a newer, reliable car is greatly reduced. I can work from home for about 3/4 of my work, so that 10-year-old car in the carport doesn't bug me. But if and when I get back to beat reporting and I'm driving around town to assignments (I'll rent cars on drivable road trips, generally) I'd feel better if my car was newer and I'm not having to wonder if something's ready to crap out when I'm on the wrong side of town and what have you.

The other thing I'm noticing now is I have the wrong kind of car (a mid-sized sedan, a 2002 model I bought new). I need a truck. I'm turning redneck like that. But seriously, I'm tired of scrambling to find a truck whenever my wife finds a chair she wants at a cash-and-carry place (like Marshall's) and I like to be able to throw bikes in the back and go. I have a mid-size sedan, she has a compact. We need that "utility" vehicle.

So here's the larger point: I agree in general with the notion of driving a car into the ground because that makes sense economically. But often there are reasons other than vanity one becomes motivated to buy a new (different) vehicle before he/she is done running the old one into the ground.

 

As the son of a car dealer and grandson of car dealer, I can safely say you all need to go buy new cars this instant. Go stimulate the economy! (Put some money in my family's pockets while you're at it.)

Honestly, it really makes no sense to trade vehicles every three or four years like a lot of folks do. If you take care of a car it'll last you 100k these days. My past three Jeeps - a notoriously unreliable vehicle if you believe Consumer Reports - all hit 100k plus, and I'm sure the one I'm driving now will too. And I beat the hell out of my Jeeps.

 

Only 100k? My 1996 Subaru Outback lasted 280,000 miles. I bought it at 180,000. Just sold the 1997 Honda Odyssey today that had 240,000.

 

A man after my own heart.

My 2005 Nissan Murano has 211,000 and change on it. Of course, when you drive 135 miles round trip to work four days a week, the miles tend to add up.

Magic's concept about buying a new car and driving it into the ground is dead-on nails, especially when you have one as reliable as a Nissan. My previous car, an Altima, had 209,000 on it when some idiot hit it in front of my house.

 

Another side benefit of the old cars.

For me...
Late 1990's Corolla. Been through horrendous winters. 175,000 miles.
- No car payments in 8 years
- Still very little rust. Great mileage.
- Best of all -- hail damage doesn't bother me. Door dents or dings. Fine. Whatever.

I defined myself by my car when I was 16. I found that to be empty. Now in my late 30s, I'd rather put money into assets that grow.

Every person I know driving a $45,000 vehicle is one layoff away from their lives becoming Domestic Armageddon. Sure, I have a mortgage and monthly obligations, I never want to feel that pressure every two weeks.... for a depreciating asset like a car!

 

Cars are definitely one of the worst monetary investments out there. Wait, I jumped in on this tangent late...how did we get from the federal budget to auto longevity?

 

Ah, an opening.

But they were <i>told</i> to take those home equity loans. American dream, peddled to all! And, given the standard of living a person like you I'm sure enjoys, they see a credit card as a means to getting some nice stuff, too. That's not to blame you by any means, but it is to say this: Lots of people would love to be wealthy. Most of them won't be. Some of those most will live beyond their means anyway, and that's part of why we're in the problem we're in.

But it's trite to sit there and say: "Well, they did it to themselves. It's <i>their</i> fault." Because, in a culture that bombards you with the need to be a certain way - from the time you're 4 years old - it is so hard to buck that imprint. And some of the people who do, let's face it, they're misers. They're people I suppose you're glad exist in theory, but people you wouldn't care to know. People who wouldn't give their teenage kid ten bucks to pitch in on gas and pizza. People who don't buy a round and just sit there at the table, watching everybody else drink a few. If the world were made up of them, it would be a very unpleasant fucking world.

And some of the ones who buck the trend are just great consumers. Which, by the way, is a learned skill. Man is not innately attuned to half the stuff that makes you a good consumer. And being rich - or, if you prefer, achieving wealth - doesn't make you a good consumer. But our market <i>depends</i> on bad consumers. We need some people to pay too much for the coat. We need some people who can't or won't cook a lick, and eat out all the time (which is about as bad of a consumer as you can get, because most people, if they tried for one year, could outcook most of the meals they eat out for a fraction of the cost and time spent on sitting there, parking, farting around, etc.) We need people who don't clip coupons and get the milk at the gas station because they're too lazy to go two blocks to the grocery store. We need people who spend $8 on sub sandwich at a county fair they make for $1.59 at home.

We need bad consumers, because if everybody was an elite consumer, let's face it: We wouldn't consume very damn much. It'd be a very small economy.

But it's equally trite to assume the only bad consumers are the ones who can afford to be. It's not going to be that way. And if you prefer to pile more tax responsibilities on those folks you certainly can - and probably feel pretty good about the mistakes they've made. But the reverse of that scenario is this: Left without options, those folks often kick over into crime, and we pay for that. We pay a whole lotta money for them to live in a prison for many years. Or we pay for their drug addiction in the cost of crime. Or we pay for their children to go through the foster care system. We end up paying, a lot, for that self-righteousness, when it might have been better to resolve the problem more progressively on the front end.

Next time you cluck your tongue, just think of it as a deposit from your bank account.

And if you want to say, "well, I'm tired of paying for that," well OK. Make some tough moral choices then. What about that war on drugs? What about adopting a whole truckload of kids just because you can afford to give them a better life than their parents did? What about for-profit private prisons, which would scoff at lifetime sentences for three armed robberies in California and would set parole to a mathematical equation. What about the day when the poor says screw it, starts to riot, and a city is left footing a million-dollar bill it can't pay for? What about privatizing social security and accountable for all the elderly who lose their shirts in the market and become 100 percent drains on the welfare system in their 60s, with 25 more years left to live?

So, to hold up misers and elite consumers as paragons of monetary virtue only works when they're a small percentage. We need poker players who fold every time the odds don't kick their ways, and we need players who bluff their way through, winning and losing big pots along the way. And, with those "losers" we need to strongly consider setting aside whatever pride we may feel over not making their mistakes, and thinking that, for the grace of God, go we. That might better inform how we manage what some call the "dregs."

 

Interesting piece at Salon this morning.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/08/11/income_inequality/index.html

 

What the hell happened to Ragu? That doesn't sound at all like him.

Oh, it's not Ragu? I just assumed from the length...

 

GOP debate from last night: Create jobs, growth, Obama is bad, and Bachmann saying she was right about the debt ceiling. I think there is still hope for Cain.

http://news.yahoo.com/missed-while-not-watching-iowa-gop-debate-083602735.html