- The White House takes on . . . Edmunds.com. I think they're maybe a little too bloggy and new media.
- Goldman Sachs and AIG, again
- Mark Kleiman and his excellent idea
- Dave Weigel belongs on Wikipedia
- New TSA signs
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I had lunch with a colleague today who told me about the Edmunds report on Cash for Clunkers and wondered if the White House would go after them for not toeing the administration’s lie.
Glad I didn’t take him up on the bet. ;)
What would it take to get Lindsay Lohan to criticize the administration?
What a bunch of thin-skinned nitwits. And what is even worse is that anybody with half a brain knows that Edmunds was right- one could see it in the car sales numbers after the program ended.
Yeah, it's one thing for the administration to take office with very little administrative experience. It's something else that the administration apparently hasn't aquired any yet, one year later, and are still throwing prissy little snits over events and reporting that are about five levels below anything the administration should be concerning itself with right now.
If Obama’s skin was any thinner, he’d have a reservoir tip on the top of his head.
Great analogy it fits in several ways the most important one is that when failure occurs it can cause a number of unpleasant or even possibly fatal events.
......nnnn..'o.o'..uu!u....algie
Illegitimi nOn carborundum
Clearly Edmunds.com is racist.
This analysis ignores not only the price impacts that a program like Cash for Clunkers has on the rest of the vehicle market, but the reports from across the country that people were drawn into dealerships by the Cash for Clunkers program and ended up buying cars even though their old car was not eligible for the program.
You tax dollars at work, folks.
Having a bunch of Obama worshipers writing a White House blog probably seemed like a good idea at the time when the president approved the project.
It's one thing to have Obama worshipers writing a blog. That describes the entire progressive blogosphere. It's another thing to give them an official Whitehouse capacity when they are just do-gooders without economic training. In that case it just makes Obama look foolish. If he wants an official blog then he should get Goolsbee or someone to write it.
Independent of whether the white house response to edmunds.com was politically astute or not, it makes an incredibly weak case.
The response concentrates on the white house's favored themes of "jobs created or saved" and "economic activity," but that isn't what edmunds.com analyzed. Edmunds.com analyzed the marginal effect on automobile sales, and the only concrete critique of that analysis in the white house response is that it ignored "the excitement of the Cash for Clunkers program", i.e. that the program might have made some people buy cars they wouldn't have, even without offering them a subsidy, just because of the glamor of it all.
Just in case you have any distrust in your own sensible scepticism of this argument, you can follow the white house's link to the CEA report and see their their own analysis does not take into account or even mention such an effect. In fact, it's pretty clear that the edmunds.com analysis is considerably more sophisticated than the CEA analysis, which arrives at its larger marginal sales figure by simply subtracting a guestimated baseline sales figure from the actual July and August sales figures.
The CEA report then spends nearly another 20 pages arguing about why the time-shifting effect might not be as large as one might initially suppose. Note that the edmunds.com analysis does not even attempt to estimate and subtract time-shifted sales, so if you don't believe purely time-shifted sales should count as a benefit of the program, however many sales were purely time-shifted really ought to be further subtracted from its estimate.
Finally, note that even if we fully accept the white house analysis, we still spent more that $6K for every marginal auto sale, which strikes me as pretty damn egregious all by itself.
...but the reports from across the country that people were drawn into dealerships by the Cash for Clunkers program and ended up buying cars even though their old car was not eligible for the program.
Luring people into a showroom with the promise of a discount they don't qualify for? Isn't that the kind of thing that unscrupulous car dealers do? Is the Obama administration claiming to have stimulated the economy through a car-salesman-in-chief bait-and-switch program?
As somebody who didn't have an eligible clunker, there's no possible way I would have gone anywhere near a car dealership during the government's 'Clunker Days' sales. The sudden spurt of clunker demand meant limited supply/selection and car dealer jacking prices because of it. You'd have to have been a complete idiot to go in just then and pay without a clunker discount.
One certainly gets the impression that a lot of the White House flunkies are a bunch Waylon Smithers.
The sudden spurt of clunker demand meant limited supply/selection and car dealer jacking prices because of it.
I bought my latest car before CfC, and neither of my old cars qualified (that's what you get for driving a 35 mpg stick shift: the government shafting you), but from what I've heard, I got a better deal through old-fashioned dickering than I could have gotten with free government money, precisely because of this effect.
That is, if I had "taken advantage" of CfC, I would have paid more out of pocket for the same car, if I could have found one. I'm sure the dealers were delighted with the outcome, though.
I'm sure the dealers were delighted with the outcome, though.
So there is indeed no good reason to actually pay out the subsidy to them after all! :-D
I think its clear by now that as evidenced by the attacks on media content it disagrees with, ranging from Fox News to a *freaking automobile bluebook evaluator*, that this is the first presidential administration composed of 28 year old snarky bloggers who seek a flamewar at every opportunity.
It is beyond amateur for an administartion to conduct itself like this, it's downright childish.
Yes, this was pretty goddamn lame. Fox is one thing -- a stupid, self-defeating campaign that left more people persuaded that Obama's administration isn't just poorly run but malignant with respect to the First Amendment -- but Edmunds.com?? I'd never even heard of it before now, and their analysis, if it was anywhere, was confined to the right wing blogosphere. The WH crying "bias" against Fox boosted Fox's ratings 15 percent (just making up that number), the attack on Edmunds must've boosted its page views by 1500 percent. And those who looked saw a reasoned and thoroughly mainstream economic analysis, and then were able to compare it to the completely anecdotal, "don't you remember how good it felt?" type of analysis -- presented as if only an idiot ("from Mars," in its snarky description) would believe numbers over feelings.
I am no longer scared that the Obama administration is a threat to the First Amendment. They couldn't manage a campaign like that if they wanted to. I am now far more scared that they're going to trip on their shoelaces and start a nuclear war. They seem that stupid.
Worse: Edmunds.com is not someplace that politically-minded people go, it's a site for car aficionados, and for people who want to know how much their used car is worth. They do talk politics some over there, because the car industry is hard to talk about without talking about politics, but it's not someplace political junkies hang out. So Obama's attack may not have made a big difference to their page views. But it will have exposed a bunch of non-political people to the spectacle of Obama stooping to swat at gnats. (Worse, at gnats that are right.)
And if you want to hear more thin-skinned whining, wander over to volokh.com where Kleiman tries to defend his 'excellent idea'.
Not a pretty site, a pity that Kleiman chose to respond only to the ad hominem attacks in the comments rather than those who challenged the substance of his “great idea” (which was generally pretty weak and unsubstantiated IMO).