Congress agreed to pour an additional $2,000,000,000 into the cash credit toward an overpriced new car for clunkers program this week, with various pundits praising the program as a rousing success. Meanwhile, industry professionals point to the $8,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers as a major factor behind the recent increase in home sales.
One thing you don’t hear many people talking about with these “successful” programs is where are all these buyers coming from?
The people buying cars and houses because of these programs are almost certainly not individuals that were previously not in the market for a new house or car to begin with. Neither the $8,000 first-time homebuyer tax credit nor the $3,500-$4,500 would make any sense as a strictly financial proposition for someone who was not previously interested in buying.
As we have discussed on these pages before, an $8,000 credit is barely over 2% of the price of the median King County home. The chance that comparable homes will be more than 2% cheaper next year is extremely high at this point, meaning it is a better value proposition for the first-time buyer to wait for prices to fall on their own much more than the piddly $8,000 of your money the government is offering to give back to you.
As far as $4,500 toward a new car goes, most people buying into this program would probably save far more money by either buying a 2 or 3-year-old car or simply keeping their so-called “clunker.” This is especially true in light of the reports of widespread dealer mark-ups of cars since this program began, in amounts that are suspiciously close to the “CARS” rebate amount (e.g. – a car that was being offered for $20,000 three weeks ago now has a sticker price of $24,500).
So if they’re not being pulled completely off the sidelines into the new car and new home markets by these tax giveaways, where are the people taking advantage of these programs coming from?
My theory: All the government is succeeding in doing with these programs is to borrow even more demand from the future.
This is exactly what caused real estate demand (i.e. sales) to spike so high during the heyday of the real estate bubble: low interest rates and lending with fog-a-mirror standards drew buyers out of the woodwork—buyers that otherwise would have waited a few years until they were in a better financial position to take on the responsibility of a massive mortgage.
The same thing happened with demand for cars. People were withdrawing equity from their homes at never-before-seen levels and spending it on cars, TVs, and vacations. Dealers were offering 0% here and no-payments-for-36-months there, driving people who would have otherwise made do with their perfectly good car to trade it in for a brand new ride that they didn’t really need.
Today’s sagging demand for houses and cars is merely the demand debt from the boom years being paid back. Of course, debt repayment is never enjoyable, and big daddy government seems hell-bent on doing whatever it takes to prevent individuals, corporations, and the government itself from having to feel the inevitable pain.
So what do we do? We create nonsense tax credit programs to borrow even more demand from the future, compacting thousands of sales that would have taken place spread out over the next year or two into just a couple of weeks or months.
Does anyone truly believe that this path is sustainable, or are our politicians merely attempting to delay the real fallout of this mess until they have secured their own personal fortunes and pushed through their pet projects and agendas?
We cannot keep borrowing demand (or money) from the future forever. Eventually the bill comes due.