The first new car that Dawn and I bought in our marriage was a 1987 Toyota Minivan. After looking through minivans on a dealership lot in Kansas City, the salesman asked that magic question, "What will it take for you to drive home in this car tonight?" About 6 hours later,after a lot of brutal and mind-boggling negotiations, we drove off the lot in a new Toyota Minivan, somewhat bewildered and feeling that we had been involved in something slimy. A couple of years later, after the engine blew and we found out that the dealership never sent in the money for the extended warranty, we realized that we'd been taken, but by that time the dealership had gone out of business and there was no way to recover our loss.
Having bought a number of cars, houses, and a few other large purchases in our 27 years of marriage, Dawn and I now have a policy that we don't make a decision on a large purchase within the first 24 hrs. Now, when a salesman asks me what it will take to drive my new car off the lot tonight, I tell him "Nothing." We have found that our policy saves us much aggravation and not a few dollars. Even those offers that "will expire at 5:00 tonight" seem to be able to be extended to the next day, if necessary.
I am reminded of this with our current health care debate. Maybe the President's tenure as Car-Seller-in-Chief at General Motors has equipped him for the job because it sure seems like we are getting the "offer expires today" hard sell. Obama is telling us, "If we don't reform health care now, it will never get done." He has set a deadline of the end of July as the time when Congress must pass the legislation, though like a good used-car dealer, when it looks as if he may lose the sale, it seems the deadline is becoming a little more flexible.
Fortunately, the American public seems to be learning, as we did after our minivan debacle. Now that the "stimulus" plan that was rushed through Congress so fast that no one had time to read it, has turned out to be a very expensive failure and we are now discovering all the little noises under the hood and find that the knobs on the dash aren’t connected to anything, people are wary of the Washington used car crowd.
Take the Cap and Tax Bill, for instance, which was rammed through the House so quickly that it was passed before it was even entirely written. (Think about that. If you approached your boss and told him that you needed an enormous amount of money for a project and you needed it by tonight, but you didn't have the specifics worked out yet, do you think you'd get it? Would any responsible businessman do that?) Now that people are seeing how much it is going to cost to lower the global temperature by 1/10 of 1 degree in 100 years, there are rumbles in the heartland. "But," we are told, "the United States must set an example for the world to follow." Of course, a stake was driven right through the heart of this argument with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent Great American Apology Tour trip to India. When she urged India to limit their carbon emissions ("Don't make the same mistake that America did." e.g.- creating the world's greatest economy, being the greatest producer of medicines, machines, and products in the history of the world, etc.), India's government basically said, "Do you think that we are idiots or something?" (That was a paraphrase, but a pretty accurate summation.)
So now the latest model that the salesmen are hawking is health care reform. To hear Obama speak, this is the Mercedes Benz of bills – not flashy, but incredibly reliable and high-quality. Unfortunately, Honest Barack doesn’t even know what’s under the hood. When asked whether the House’s bill will allow people to keep their own insurance, as Barack promised, he replied, “You know, I have to say that I am not familiar with the provision you are talking about.” (It doesn’t, by the way.)
And don’t expect the salesmen to drive the same models they want you to buy. In Senate committee, a Republican amendment introduced by Sen. (Dr.) Tom Coburn (R-OK) requiring Congress to participate in any nationalized health care plan they enact was stripped by the Democrats on the committee. They know that the Mercedes body is powered by a Dodge Valiant engine.
As Moliere said, “Unreasonable haste is the direct road to error.” We all know this. The essay hastily written the night before it is due, as I can personally attest, is never as good as the essay meticulously researched and written. Who would take out a mortgage before reading all the paperwork? Oops, bad example, but you know how that turned out.
Any large purchase deserves careful study and thought. For our governmental used car salesmen to try to bum rush a this package by us without allowing us to even read the paperwork, let alone think about our purchase means only one thing – they know that if we are allowed to carefully consider it, we will see it for the lemon it is.
Note: I used stereotypes in order to illustrate a point. I apologize to any slimy used car salesmen that may have been offended by being compared to politicians.
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