Shot in the Dark

Slim Pickins

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

I went with my son-in-law looking at used cars this weekend. Have you seen the prices? Shockingly high. With incentives, rebates and interest rates, brand-new costs the same as used.

You do, indeed, pay a lot these days for that “pre-depreciated” option.

The used vehicle market seems to be distorted: there aren’t enough used vehicles so the scarcity has driven up demand and with it, price. It’s as if some giant vacuum cleaner sucked up millions of perfectly good used cars and crushed them to get them off the market. Weird.

My son-in-law can afford a replacement vehicle so I suppose that makes him a 1%-er. I have no idea how single mothers or low income minority families do it. The burden is falling on those least able to afford it. Good thing this isn’t the result of some well-intentioned Bush-era government program or there’d be Hell to pay.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

No kidding.

Because if an Administration were to make “imposing scarcity for a necessity – affordable transportation – on low-income Americans” a “first 100 days” priority, some might think that Administration didn’t have the good of this country’s poorest at heart.

That’d be just weird, woudln’t it?

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Mitch Berg

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Comments

4 responses to “Slim Pickins”

  1. The Big Stink Avatar
    The Big Stink

    Why would anyone want, or need, to buy a car – new or used? We have light rail. If you need to get someplace more specific, you can take the bus.

  2. Night Writer Avatar
    Night Writer

    We put some seed money into a friend’s business where he looks for undervalued used cars at auction or other sources, buys them, fixes them up (new tires, parts as needed) and resells them. He just did this with a ’98 Nissan Altima with 160,000 miles and sold it in about a week for nearly $3,000 and brought us a little dividend check the other day, and he’s looking for more cars. The Clunkers program depleted the available stock, but has made the surviving vehicles more valuable.

  3. bosshoss429 Avatar
    bosshoss429

    The whole cash for clunkers program, one of the Obumbler’s many epic failures, is now having its intended “trickle down effect.” This is defined as the used cars that would normally have “trickled down” to price points that lower income people can afford. As Joe pointed out, buyers are seeing the results of that failure! Proof positive once again that DemocRATs are not the guardians of the working man and the poor!

  4. Speed Gibson Avatar
    Speed Gibson

    Much as I’d like to blame Cash for Clunkers, which no doubt continued or exacerbated the problem, used car prices shot up well back in the prior century. We haven’t bought a used car in the last 20 years. It no longer makes any financial sense, to pay near new prices for a three year old car with no warranty.

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