A loan or bailout for the automobile industry makes as much sense as a blood transfusion without any effort to close the patient's gaping wounds. The auto industry is bleeding money through overproduction, runaway health care costs and wasted skilled labor (in the notorious "job bank").

The problem is not that there are too many car dealers, but that there is too much inventory on dealer lots. Henry Ford's "My Life and Work" (1922) says, "We make cars to sell, not to store, and a month's unsold production would turn into a sum the interest on which alone would be enormous."

Instead, the car companies push inventory onto dealer lots, presumably to keep their production lines running and absorb overhead. Consumers can and should game this dysfunctional system by waiting until the end of the model year, when the dealer and/or manufacturer must offer incentives to move the obsolete inventory to make room for more inventory. The carrying costs are waste by definition, because they are not something for which customers are willing to pay.