Starting in July, you can trade in your old "clunker" for a new car and receive a $3500 or even $4500 voucher. The purpose of this bill is to put more fuel efficient vehicles on the road and get rid of guzzlers. It sounds like a good idea but their oversites have failed to make it a great idea and therefore have failed completely.

What would have made it better?

• Why just improve gas mileage? Why not improve emissions too? A car from 1990 has a higher emissions standard than a 2010 model. Why not get rid of the 1990 car and get a cleaner burning car on the road?
• Why not use this as a time to help stimulate the economy and help the failing car manufactures? Since it’s the US tax dollars that are paying for the vouchers, why not have given an extra bonus for buying a GM, Ford or Chrysler?

There are so many problems with the implementation that the program is worthless. First, you have to trade in your old car for a new one that improves the combined fuel economy by at least 2 MPG for light duty trucks and 4 MPG for passenger cars. If you improve your truck or car by 5 or 10 MPG, respectively, you will get the full $4,500 voucher. Why is the 2/4/5/10 MPG a problem? Because, in 2008, they changed the way they rate MPGs of cars. Starting in 2008 the EPA changed the rating to be at a faster speed, faster acceleration, air conditioner on and colder outside temperatures. This means that the new car ratings are more accurate but what it really means is that the MPG rating for your "clunker" is going to be inflated and makes it almost impossible to achieve the improvements needed for the voucher.

My dad has a 1993 GMC Sonoma truck. It’s considered a light-duty truck and therefore requires a 2/5 MPG improvement for the vouchers. The best way to describe his 16 year old truck is to call it a clunker. The EPA says it gets a combined 18 MPG. In order for him to qualify for the $3,500 voucher, he will have to buy a vehicle that gets 20MPG or better. Good luck finding that in a truck. After calling the NHTSA, they recommended he buy a sedan or a hybrid truck. Get real! A GMC Sierra Hybrid starts at $39,365 and it’s rated at 21/22 MPG for a combined 21 MPG. The non-hybrid GMC Sierra starts at $20,350 and is rated at 15/21 MPG for a combined 18 MPG. That means a 3 MPG improvement costs $20,000. The improvement in emissions and gas mileage are virtually nil. The improvement over a 18 MPG GMC Sierra and his 1993 GMC Sonoma are a real 3 MPG improvement (real, not over inflated EPA ratings) and a huge improvement in emissions.

The government is not encouraging my dad to buy a new truck. Therefore they are not:

• Getting rid of a large polluting vehicle
• Improving real gas mileage
• Stimulating the economy.  For a bankrupt American car manufacture!

-FAIL-

AIG is going to pay out $165 million in bonus after 1) taking $170 billion tax payers dollars and 2) losing $61.7 billion in 2008 Q4, the largest in corporate history.  People should be angry about this!  It's appauling for a company to lose money and pay bonuses at the same time.  How do I get a contractual obligation that if my company loses $61.7 billion a quater that I get a bonus?  This is just another example of corporate greed putting themselves before anyone else.

I think the Obama administration should stop payment on the checks and put a retroactive law in place saying that any company talking bailout money is not allowed to pay cash bonuses to their employees or executives until over dollar is paid back.  Since tax payers as a whole own 80% of the company, we should all be allowed to cast a vote for the board and CEO to get rid of these crooks!

I got the email yesterday for a free Quizno's sub.  Apparently they are trying to give 1 million away for free.  I signed up, my friends signed up, and my family signed up.  I didn't bring lunch in to work today because I was looking forward to a free sub and (paid) chips and a drink.  Three of us guys at work went to Quizno's in Newport Beach at East Bluffs and were greeted by the manager saying he can't afford to honor the coupon.  He said he could give us a free drink but not a sub.  I've had Quizno's once in my life and didn't care for it because it was too salty - I figured a free sub would give them a second chance to redeem their food and it might have made a future customer out of me.  Instead, we walked next door to Carl's Jr.

I talked to a friend of mine, Scott (honorable mention here: Why Wikipedia is worthless), who took his family to get a free sub and the place turned him away because they had "hit their free sub quota."

Quizno's website has a tracker about how many free subs they have given away.  It should say how many email addresses they have collected with the false hopes of a free sandwhich.  I feel bad for the owners of the restaurants because their corporate office wouldn't subsidize their promotion and didn't think about their store owners going out of business to honor the free subs. 

To Quizno's marketing team: Please add back 8 to your counter because these "free subs" aren't worth the tree we've killed printing them or the carbon emissions our cars have emitted to get there!

Want to read another complaint about Quizno's Million Emails Collected And No Subs Given in perfect Iambic pentameter?  Check out Neil's Blog. - just kidding about Iambic pentamter, it's actually haiku.

In Sarah Palin's interview on Fox News (11/10/2008) she made mention about the bloggers in their parent's basement wearing pajamas.  Off topic: I guess it's only mamma's boys that can't get dressed or elite media in this world?  Back on topic: She said the book ban was a lie.  That "Harry Potter wasn't even published when [she] was the Mayor of Wasilla".  Unfortunately, that's not true.  She served two three year terms from 1996-2002.  The first Harry Potter book was released in the UK on 6/30/1997 and later in the US on 9/1/1998.  Clearly she was serving as Mayor during that time.

Maybe it was an oversight or maybe it's just another "fact" that she is trying to slip through us mamma's boys.  Either way, we need to keep her honest so we don't have to see her again in 2012.

We put $300,000 down on our house.  It has depreciated about $100,000.  I have lost $100,000 and the bank hasn't lost anything.  I can't write down my loan for the depreciation because the loan is still less than the house.  The people the government is looking to bail out didn't put any money down and their house depreciated $100,000.  If they go to find a new loan, the bank will have to take the $100,000 hit and nothing happens to the home "owner". 

No one knows when the housing market will stop it's downward spiral so investors and the market have no idea how much they will actually lose.  The bailout is designed so that the government will buy these bad loans from the lenders.  The lenders will sale them at a loss but they will get rid of them so they can finally put a number to their loss and it will make the street a little less jittery.  The government is going to then work with the "owners" to lower the principal on the house and lower their rates.  Remember, the government is me and you; it's our tax dollars that are just being erased by dropping the principal of the mortgage.  The owners now owe less on their house and I still owe the same.  They get a better rate and mine stays the same.  This isn't fair to any tax payer and it sends the wrong message to our kids: if you screw up, the government will bail you out. 

The market is bad and people losing their houses is not acceptable so we have to do something.  Read my idea to help after the jump. More...

I've always thought of Wikipedia as a good source of information.  I feel it becomes more accurate over time as more people contribute and ideas evolve unhindered.  I learned today that I have been wrong.

My city, Lake Forest, California, has a very informative page on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Forest,_California. Well, informative up to the point of "Notable Residents."  Two people, Dan Huard and Armando Alvarez seem to be very proud of themselves.  Dan Huard feels he is notable because he works at Digg and Armando feels he is notable because he won an award for design.  Neither of them are any more notable than me or you to the public at large.  As a small protest about the stupidity of having these "Notable Residents," I decided to edit the page and add a friend of mine that I feel is Notable.  Some of his qualifications are as follows:

• Good person
• Hard worker
• Has a great family that he supports
• Has a beautiful daughter
• He bought a house in Foothill Ranch a year ago
• College graduate
• Winner of Red Robin's Valentine Day Engagement Story Competition
• As he jokingly says, "A friend first, entertainer second and father third".

More...