no one mismanages like they do

Remember, everyone… these are the folks who will soon be running your health care:

Like other car dealers, the one I work for is seeing a lot of action over people trying to get out of their old (and not so old) gas guzzlers and into more economical cars and SUV’s. Our dealership has worked about 25 such trades so far. We have twelve salesmen. I’ve had three deals — two of which won’t be delivered until next week. Now, there’s reason to be nervous:

The government’s popular “cash for clunkers” program may be running out of money after only a matter of days as car shoppers flock to dealerships to take advantage of the rebates.

The White House said Thursday it was assessing its options amid concerns the $1 billion budget for rebates for new car sales may have been depleted. The program officially began last week and has been heavily publicized by automakers and dealers.

…

One problem is that many of the people with clunkers have bad credit and can’t get financed for the new car they want to go in to. So . . . we’ve seen others — the frugal types — who don’t really need the government assistance but are taking advantage of the program, anyway. Still, if it gets some old heaps off the road, that’s a good thing and if it spurs new car sales for a week or so, that helps when we (the salesmen) get our commission checks next month.

If the program is, in fact, suspended, then the dealers are stuck with covering the $3,500 – 4,500 dollars the government was going to kick in. The average markup on a, let’s say, Corolla is only about $1,100 and on a Rav 4 it’s about $2,000. At high-volume dealerships that whore-out their cars anyway and live on slim margins, this could be a financial disaster.

One interesting thing of note – if you take a look at the article Jeff linked to, it indicates that 22,782 vehicles has been purchased by the government, and around $96,000,000 had been spent to purchase those vehicles in question. Even assuming the largest not-really-”rebate” available was given for those vehicles ($4,500), the total expenditure thus far should have been somewhere around $103,000,000.
Now, it has been a few years since my elementary arithmetic lessons, so I might need someone to check this for me… but I am fairly certain that $103,000,000 does not equal $1,000,000,000 (the budget for this not-really-”rebate” program), and is in fact less.
So, where, exactly, has the other $897,000,000 gone? If the “budget has been depleted”, as our Glorious President’s lackeys seem to indicate, how is it that only a scant 10.3% of that budget was actually used to do what it was supposed to do?
Do we really want 10% efficiency for our health care? If there has ever been a better indication that the government should be massively cut back from what it is now, I cannot think of it…