Car Allowance Rebate System And Your Trade In

Since the beginning of this year, I have been keeping tabs on the various “cash for clunkers” programs being rolled out, particularly in Germany where their scrappage program has had a most positive effect on new car sales. Britain currently has a similar program in place while several other European states have crafted their own programs too.

Realizing An Environmental Benefit Too

In the US, cash for clunkers legislation was debated in Congress for several months as legislators attempted to craft a program that would remove older, less fuel efficient and more polluting models off of American roadways, scrap them; replacing them with newer, more fuel efficient and environmentally friendly cars. With this legislation Congress not only wanted to stimulate new car sales, but they were looking for an environmental benefit as well.

The US scrappage program – Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS) – has been signed into law and will kick in once all of the details have been hashed out by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) who has oversight. The NHTSA has created a website at cars.gov which consumers should visit for more information. This is critical because scam artists are already at work spreading misinformation and in some cases attempting to steal consumer information.

What CARS Can Do For You

The program won’t be going into place until later this month (July 23rd is the latest date that it can start) so it is important that you follow the rules in order to get your rebate (credit) which will be given to you at the dealership when you buy your car. This means that if you’ve negotiated the final price for a 2009 Ford Fusion SE down to exactly $20,000, then the dealer will deduct as much as $4500 off of that price. You could end up leaving your Ford dealership driving a leftover Fusion (the 2010 models are already out) for just $15,500 plus taxes, tags, registration and other fees. A terrific price for a quality midsize sedan!

The downside to this government program is that only one billion dollars has been made available to fund it. This means that around 250,000 car buyers will be able to participate in the program which comes to an end on November 1st or when funding runs out. Likely, they’ll be a huge surge in showroom traffic when the program kicks in, drying up available rebates by September. In Germany, the program was so popular that it was extended with additional funding; new car sales are up 40% over last year as a result. Don’t count on that happening in the US although Congress and the president are certainly in a spending mood.

Avoid The Scam, Follow CARS

I won’t go into all of the details of whether you’ll be eligible for this program as the parameters are quite narrow. This means that only owners of older gas hogs will be able to participate provided that all of the other requirements have been met. Visit the How Will Cars Work page to find step by step program details; if you find other information online that contradicts the federal program, then please ignore it or risk being scammed.

Chilling: Obama’s OFA Indoctrination Squads

It has been just over two months now since Barack Obama ascended to the presidency of the United States of America. Since then, we’ve heard and seen the president at news conferences, on Jay Leno, 60 Minutes and other shows. His image seems to be cropping up almost everywhere; one neighbor still has a huge poster of Obama plastered to their living room window with the word “hope” underneath it.

Clearly, these are interesting times. Interesting as in weird.

Obamaism v. Nazism

People get angry when any sort of parallel with Hitler’s Germany is offered when mentioning Barack Obama and his magnetic appeal to the masses, but I cannot help but see them. Well before Germany’s turn to national fascism (Nazism) the country was a fractured, but rising power which came together in 1871 to form what historians call the German Empire.

Stretching from France to Russia, the new German state was an industrial powerhouse with Chancellor Otto von Bismarck holding sway until 1890, a man widely credited with rolling out national health care and old-age insurance plans during the 1880s. The country was also fairly tolerant to foreigners, including Jews, whose numbers topped 500,000 as the Nazis rose to power.

When Adolf Hitler took office he unified a defeated, demoralized country which was still reeling from its humiliating loss in The Great War (World War I) fifteen years earlier. Hitler was instrumental in imposing “Gleichschaltung” which was a way of getting rid of individualism in favor of have people adhere to a unified way of thinking, in order to exert totalitarian control over the masses.

A Successful Grassroots Campaign

People rightfully credit Barack Obama’s grassroots organizing campaign for his victory last fall. Certainly, the collapse of the economy ensured his triumph, one that was threatened when Sarah Palin emerged as John McCain’s veep choice just weeks earlier. Obama immediately blamed Bush for the country’s economic woes, easily associating McCain with the sitting president’s policies.

The organization that Obama established was called Obama For America (OFA), with millions of Americans giving their financial support (and email addresses) in a bid to form a strong base. In January, Obama took the unusual step to encourage the organization to continue, renaming it Organizing for America, keeping the trademark campaign logo and tasking its members to help transform American society.

Run By The Democrat National Committee

Specifically, the OFA is a political group run by the Democrat National Committee tasked with supporting and advancing the Obama legislative agenda. Now, I’ve learned that the OFA has mobilized its members to go door to door in a bid to sell the president’s health care, energy and education agendas to the American people. That first campaign launched this past weekend; we weren’t home so I don’t know if we were paid a personal visit or not.

I don’t have a problem with people campaigning, obtaining signatures for a petition, asking for financial support, etc. If the OFA wants to do that, it is within their rights unless local laws forbid door to door solicitations.

What I don’t like is that this campaign is under the OFA umbrella, a DNC group with a clear political agenda, one which I do not support. While campaigning, Obama rightfully took George W. Bush to task for spending hundreds of billions of dollars and running up our national debt but is hypocritically spending trillions more himself in a bid to implement his plan for America. Our country is being hit with a social agenda contrary to what many Americans believe in while burdening us with a level of debt that won’t easily go away.

What are those parallels to Nazism that I see with Obama devotees? It is their blind support for a charismatic leader who has stumbled early and often as he attempts to lead this nation. If people can support initiatives that promote abortion, increase spending, attack free enterprise and push an undefined social agenda without question, then those seeds will take root, changes which will mold America much in the way that Germany was reshaped prior to the second world war.