TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/110689/p69a

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 3.7 KB | 83 lines

                                                                                BUSINESS, Page 69

Money Angles

Why I Voted for a Used Car


By Andrew Tobias


    The biggest vote you make is not on Election Day but when
you buy a car, as I just did. A new Mercedes? For the West
German economy, 60,000 votes. A new Infiniti? For Japan, 40,000
votes. A new Chevy Beretta? For Detroit, 13,000.

    Now don't get your yuppie BMW back up. I know you're every
bit as patriotic as I am. And like you, I believe in free trade:
you should buy whatever damn car you please. (And, yes, I know
your Japanese car may have been built here, and that your Miata,
built over there, is part American because Ford owns 25% of
Mazda.)

    What's all this nationalism, anyway? This is increasingly
one world, and the goal is for the whole globe to prosper, not
to have the Japanese shun our rice, or we their cars, out of
tribal paranoia. So what if Detroit just laid off more than
24,000 workers, with predictions of more to come?

    Still, we're paying for a mountain of foreign goods that
will be junk in ten years with land, buildings and the rights
to The Three Stooges -- things that are eternal (well, maybe not
the buildings). We're like the Manhattan Indians, who had
little immediate need for the island and couldn't resist the
trinkets.

    It's become a cliche that the Indians would have made out
like bandits if they had merely invested the $24 they got at 8%
(let alone in Fidelity's Magellan mutual fund). They'd have had
$32 trillion by now. But the point is, they didn't take cash and
invest it, they took trinkets. Today we're taking Nintendo games
and Honda Preludes.

    When it comes to productive tools, we should buy the best,
regardless of origin, because it's in our long-term
self-interest to do so. The best tools make for the most
competitive products. But when it comes to trinkets, we should
think twice. Of course, with a lot of today's trinkets -- VCRs
and camcorders, to name just two -- there's no way to buy
American. The only choice is whether to buy at all, or whether,
perhaps, to invest that money instead.

    But with a car, it's different. We still make some here;
and while my friends assure me their foreign ones are a lot
better, they all go at about the same speed.

    So this is one area in which those who lament America's low
savings rate and high trade deficit could -- I'm not saying
should, that's their business -- vote differently:

    -- They could buy a less expensive car than they otherwise
might, investing the difference, as the Indians should have, to
grow richer. (Actually, many of us are not buying the trinkets
with money we have. We're borrowing to buy the trinkets, which
is really insane.)

    -- They could buy an American car, even if it began to
shimmy at 90 or 100 m.p.h. on the autobahn.

    Call me un-American for likening cars to trinkets -- it's
un-American not to take cars very seriously. But consider the
irony as you call me un-American from behind the wheel of your
$45,000 Porsche.

    With these thoughts in mind, more or less, I bought a 1986
burgundy Chrysler LeBaron convertible.

    I was sorely tempted to buy a new one -- they look great,
and I was hardly keeping Detroit ahum by buying this used one.
But it seemed an awful waste of money for someone who drives as
little as I do, and no small temptation to the car thieves
who've come to think of my neighborhood as their own. Instead,
I decided to spend part of the $14,000 or so I saved on one of
Compaq's amazing new 6-lb. computers -- in my line, a productive
tool -- and to invest the rest at 8% for 363 years, as the
Indians should have.