If You’ve Got Auto Stocks, Sell Them Quickly

You’d better do it as fast as you can, because they’ll be worthless once Obama is finished with them.

This from the Midwest Magical Misery Tour, in which your tax dollars are paying for a campaign bus ride more than a year before an election…

The country’s automakers should ditch their focus on SUVs and trucks in favor of smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles, President Obama said Monday.

“You can’t just make money on SUVs and trucks,” Obama said during a town hall forum in Cannon Falls, Minn. “There is a place for SUVs and trucks, but as gas prices keep on going up, you have got to understand the market. People are going to try to save money.”

Obama has positioned the revival and reshaping of the auto industry as a major part of his administration’s push to improve the economy and create jobs.

“When I came into office they were talking about the liquidation of GM and Chrysler, and a lot of folks said you can’t help them, and it’s a waste of the government’s money to try and help them,” Obama said Monday. “But what I said was, we can’t afford to lose up to a million jobs in this country, particularly in the Midwest.”

Obama was speaking at the start of a three-day bus tour of the Midwest. He will visit Decorah, Iowa, later in the day.

Does Obama actually purport to identify what will drive the auto market? What was his track record as an investor in auto stocks prior to being elected?

This is a president whose bailout of GM on behalf of the autoworkers’ union produced the firing of that company’s CEO by presidential fiat, not to mention a complete rape of the company’s bondholders. Obama also attempted to tilt the playing field so as to bring forward sales of the Chevy Volt, leading to a whopping 125 Volts being sold a month. And unsold auto inventories overall are now back to what they were in 2008.

In addition, Obama has dictated an impossible, unworkable CAFE standard of 54 mpg for 2025. No current model on the market gets that kind of gas mileage.

And then there’s Cash For Clunkers. Let me tell you a story about this market perversion.

I’m in the market for a car. But working out of my house as I do, and living in what is pretty close to a perfect location, I drive maybe 300 miles a month or so. I just don’t use a car all that much. So I’ve decided some time ago that I just don’t want to finance an auto purchase – I’m going to write a check for $10,000-15,000 or so, get something used and not have to worry about a car note.

And I’ve been driving SUV’s since college. I like SUV’s and I’m not changing my style. I’m buying an SUV. Particularly now that Obama decides he’s going to take a dump on SUV’s I’m going to buy one, because who is he to tell me what kind of car I should drive?

Except when I start looking around the car websites, you can’t hardly get an SUV for less than $14,000 or so unless it’s got more than 100,000 miles on it. I’m appalled at that, and I can’t understand it.

So I talk to a guy I know who’s a sales manager for a car dealership here in Baton Rouge, and he tells me there’s a reason for that.

Namely, Cash For Clunkers.

He says that I wouldn’t believe how many of the SUV’s that would be EXACTLY what I’m looking for ended up getting crunched at junkyards because of Cash For Clunkers. He says they took in so many really nice SUV’s that had 30,000 miles on them through Cash For Clunkers it wasn’t even funny.

And then he tells me it was a several-times-a-day ritual that these things would come in on trade-ins, and the folks from the dealership would go to the back and stare mouths agape at what they had to do to them. He said they’d drain all the oil out of the engine, put the thing in park and then lay a cinder block down on the gas pedal until the engine burned up. He said other dealerships would inject this liquid silicon stuff into the engines to kill them, but they didn’t do that at his dealership.

He said once they had to do it to a year-old Mercedes SUV. One of the secretaries started cursing when she saw that. He said it was as sad as could be.

And because this happened over and over and over, all those two-year-old SUV’s which got crunched two years ago aren’t on the market. And so somebody like me comes along to buy a used SUV, and I get to pay what I was going to pay for one of them without Cash For Clunkers so I can have the privilege of buying something seven years old instead of four.

I talked to a guy who’s a used car wholesaler last week, relayed this story to him and he said it’s absolutely true and not only that he could show me concrete data on the giant hole in the used car market to prove it.

This is a president who has created a shortage of a commodity for which there is demand and distorted a major piece of the market while using taxpayer dollars to destroy hundreds of millions of dollars worth of usable products. And he believes he’s qualified to instruct the automakers as to what kinds of vehicles they should make.

Milton Friedman once said if you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand. Well, the federal government has in two years created a shortage of SUV’s in America, which just a few years ago probably would have been seen as the same sort of accomplishment. That’s Barack Obama for you.

You don’t want to own auto stocks in a country governed by this man. Sell now and save yourself.