Things I Didn’t Know
Ramping up slowly here, folks, and it’s staggering how much happens in the world of traffic in a week — there are dozens of things I would have posted on, had my attentions not been elsewhere.
With Hummer on the verge of extinction, save for its purchase by some Chinese manufacturer looking for a new market niche for emerging oligarchs, I came across this piece by Salon on the rise and fall of America’s most unbeloved car brand. This bit struck me in particular:
Beginning in 1996, a series of tax laws combine to create large tax credits for certain Hummer buyers. By 2002, the New York Times reports that, thanks to changes in the tax code during the Bush administration, an eligible buyer can deduct $34,912 of the $48,800 base price of the Hummer.
God does that now seem like a piece of Bush-era lunacy (and keep in mind at the same time the deduction for hybrid vehicles was being capped and restricted). That whopping deduction supposedly reflected the Hummer’s role as a “light duty truck,” and hence a work vehicle for yeoman farmers and the like, though the only people I ever saw driving them looked dressed for nothing for labor intensive than a day on the links — and they were certainly never hauling anything beyond a pair of jet-skis or ATVs (and don’t get me started on those!). In retrospect they were the perfect emblem of the Bush interregnum, a totem of entitlement, profligacy, social and personal insecurity, militarism as a form of consumption, and absolute pretension — “all cattle and no hat.”
This entry was posted on Monday, May 11th, 2009 at 8:12 am and is filed under Things I Didn't Know. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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