I was talking with a friend last night who's trying to help his son buy a first car.
He’s not looking for anything fancy. Just a car. Something that runs, gets the kid to work and back, maybe survives a fender bender without becoming a total loss.
He's been looking for weeks, but the sub-$3,000 range is grim. What's there is either high-mileage to the point of being a gamble, or neglected past the point of being worth fixing.
Really what he’s found is that the kind of cars we could buy when we were young are just… gone.
The inventory that should exist at that price point simply doesn't.
It got us talking about his first car. A used 1991 Geo Prizm. He said it had almost 150k miles on it when he finally sold it. He drove that thing into the ground, and it still had enough life in it to be worth $500 to the guy he sold it to.
He had paid $1,400 for it.
A lot of us have similar first car stories. Those “beaters” taught us things we didn’t learn in school.
That if you maintain something, it lasts. That a car payment isn't inevitable; it's a choice. That you could drive something “embarrassing” and save the difference, or you could finance something you couldn't afford and hand part of every paycheck to a bank for years.
A lot of kids used to learn that lesson. Buy a $1,000 Civic, run it a couple years, sell it for $700 and use the cash, plus some savings, and get a $2,500, slightly newer Civic. Repeat until you’re still car-debt free, but driving something pretty nice.
The whole thing was a ladder (an unglamorous, leaking-a-quart-of-oil-a-week ladder) but a ladder nonetheless.
The bottom rung is gone now because back in 2009, the government cut it off.
It was called the Car Allowance Rebate System, but you probably remember it as Obama’s “Cash for Clunkers”.
The premise was pretty simple: Trade in your old car, regardless of the shape it was in, and get $3,500 to $4,500 toward a new one.
The politicians and navel-gazing economists whose job it is to sit around and dream up ways to mess with things that work just fine on their own clapped each other on the backs for coming up with a way to save the environment and stimulate the economy all in one fell swoop.
690,000 vehicles were turned in, but what a lot of people still don’t know is that dealers weren't allowed to resell any of those cars. They weren't even allowed to part them out!
They were legally required to pour sodium silicate—a liquid glass compound—into the engines and run them until they seized. Then they had to crush them.
690,000 working cars, simply gone. Poof.
Not because they didn't run or because nobody wanted them, but because this is what progress looks like to the political class.
The bottom of the market—the $900 Civics, the $1,200 Corollas—got priced out of reach for the people who needed them most so suddenly all those people who couldn't find an affordable used car had to finance instead.
Cash for Clunkers didn't just destroy cars. It normalized the 84-month auto loan. Cars stopped being something you saved up and bought and instead became something you were perpetually paying off.
The car payment was suddenly inevitable. And just like that… a generational shift in the way we view debt.
This is how it always works.
Government programs concentrate benefits on organized interests (in this case, automakers who wanted to move new inventory, unions who wanted production numbers, environmental groups who wanted fuel economy data to improve) and spread the costs across everyone else.
Especially the people with the least margin to absorb them.
The kid who needed a $900 car didn't have a lobbying budget, and nobody in Washington was thinking about the girl who needed a beater to get to work.
We wrote a book with a similar dynamic.
The Tuttle Twins and the Food Truck Fiasco. In it, Ethan and Emily watch crony competitors use their friends in government to squeeze out the scrappy newcomers trying to compete fairly. They learn why it keeps happening, and what it looks like from inside the system.
It’s a book that teaches one of those foundational principles that, once you see it, you can't stop seeing the same pattern everywhere. Cash for Clunkers. Taxi medallions. Minimum wage laws.
Same story, different industries, but always the same outcome.
My friend still talks about his oil-guzzling Prizm like owning it was a badge of honor.
I get it. It kind of is. But his son isn’t going to get to have that experience.
The world has been purposely made harder for our kids. Cash for Clunkers is just one example, but there are so many. Even just talking about used cars—did you know that the price of used cars jumped 30% from 2020-2021?!
They blame it on the pandemic, but you and I know it's because they printed $3.3 trillion that year.
That's what we need to help our kids understand.
Not only is the government not going to hand them a ladder, but oftentimes it saws the bottom couple of rungs off the ladder they manage to find for themselves.
The kids who are going to make it in spite of this are the ones who learned early to look for the angle, start with what they have, and not wait for conditions to be fair before they start building.
I’m pretty sure you’re already teaching your kids a lot of these important lessons. Food Truck Fiasco just gives them the vocabulary to name what they're seeing.
Check it out today.
— Connor
