Jeremiah Tolbert

I believe that the solu­tion to the woes of the American auto­mo­bile indus­try is to finally make explicit what is implicit in American cul­ture.  We are car own­ers. Especially out here in Fly-​​over Country.   So my solu­tion is quite sim­ple.  Rather than just give bil­lions to the auto­mo­tive indus­try to do… what­ever and tril­lions to the finance indus­try for… who knows, how about we just pay for every sin­gle American to receive a $25,000 car allowance every 10 years from the time you turn 16 until you are deemed unsafe for the road.

That’s right, social­ize the auto­mo­bile indus­try!  You get a car and YOU get a car and that home­less guy down the street gets a car and sin­gle moms get a car!  Everybody gets a car!  Let the com­pa­nies make their var­i­ous mod­els and com­pete with one another, but most peo­ple will be pick­ing out cars with a $25k check in hand. Oh, I guess you prob­a­bly should limit the voucher sys­tem to American-​​made cars.  But hey, screw the global econ­omy, right? America first!

No cit­i­zen of America will be with­out a car. It’ll be great!  Where I live, you would be fool­ish to not own one any­way.  Imagine all the peo­ple it will put to work to sell these things and move them around and to make them.  It’ll be like the 50s all over again!

This has a cas­cad­ing effect with some ancil­lary costs of course.    First we spend all that money on new cars, now every­body is on the road.  Well, I guess we’re going to have to spend more money road con­struc­tion and improve­ments. That puts a whole bunch of peo­ple to work as a mat­ter of course.  Now we’re revi­tal­iz­ing two indus­tries at once.  Bonus!

But what hap­pens if gas prices dou­ble or triple again, you ask. The mar­ket will sort it out!  With so much money dumped into the auto indus­try, we’ll see green tech­nol­ogy auto star­tups all over the place, because not every­one on the planet is as dumb as the peo­ple run­ning GM and Chrysler.  They can see what’s com­ing.  I pre­dict Tesla comes out with a $25,000 4-​​door all-​​electric sedan thanks to the mar­ket demand a cou­ple of years after the pro­gram goes into effect.

I call this a mod­est pro­posal, but is it any more ridicu­lous than giv­ing buck­ets of money to com­pa­nies and not receiv­ing any­thing in return for the American tax­pay­ers? Is it really any more nuts than what’s been com­ing out of our Adminstration?   And hey, on the up side, when we’re all evicted from our homes, we’ll at least have nice new cars in which to sleep.

And the best part?  No six-​​figure-​​salary-​​earning bankers will get a dime of it.  Let the finan­cial indus­try shrivel up and die for all I car (er, care).  I’ll have a new Camero!  Who needs a job when you have a hot new car and the open road, anyway?