[FoxBusiness] A federal appellate court vacated a rule last week that advocates argue would have made the car-buying process more transparent and saved consumers billions.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit struck down the Combating Auto Retail Scams Trade Regulation – or CARS – rule before it could go into effect, arguing that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) failed to follow its own internal process.
The rule was aimed at fighting two common types of illegal tactics consumers face when buying a car, such as bait-and-switch tactics and hidden junk fees. But it also included provisions specifically protecting military members and their families from deceptive dealers falsely claiming military affiliation, along with addressing other issues unique to service members.
That all sounds very noble, and if a Trump administration initiative, probably is.
The FTC estimated in a report that the rule would save consumers more than $3.4 billion and cut down on the time it takes to buy a car by 72 million hours each year.
Saving lots of time and money? That’s like adding fireworks and dancing girls to the thing!
Critics such as the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) – an American trade organization representing nearly 16,500 franchised dealers, and the Texas Automobile Dealers Association (TADA) – said the FTC's research was "rushed" and "poorly researched."
They would say that if it’s a Trump administration initiative…
A slew of changes would have taken effect if the rule had been implemented, including requiring car dealers to disclose the price of the car along with all mandatory fees up front every time they advertise the vehicle, according to Erin Witte, director of Consumer Protection for the Consumer Federation of America.
The FTC, which was granted authority to regulate unfair or deceptive practices by motor vehicle dealers under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010,
…when Barack Obama was president, so you know it wasn’t a good idea…
"discovered that throughout the process of buying a car, it is frequently riddled with deception and unfair practices" said Witte.
The price consumers see is "almost never" the price that they pay at the end of the day, said Witte, adding that it's "remarkably common" for a dealership to tell consumers that they can't tell them a price over the phone, and they should come in person to discuss what kind of deal they can offer.
Witte said it's done intentionally to squeeze more out of consumers and that the tactics also rip customers away from "honest car dealers."
"Not every car dealer wants to gouge people," she said. "There are lots of car dealers that want to honestly advertise the price of their car, but they lose out if someone's advertising the same car for a cheaper price. But they can track someone on their lot for four hours and then jack up the price because they're there."
New Jersey car dealership owner Tom Maoli told FOX Business that he was an advocate for the CARS rule because it would have increased consumer confidence in buying cars from franchise car dealerships. Historically, they have "bad view of how they are treated at car dealerships across the country," said Maoli, whose company Celebrity Motor Car Company runs six dealerships.
Conversely, NADA and TADA argued that the new rule would have "added massive amounts of time, complexity, paperwork and cost to the car-buying and car-shopping experience for virtually every customer." The industry groups also said it "would have been a nightmare for consumers and dealers alike."
NADA said consumers would have spent an additional 60 to 80 minutes at the dealership for every transaction, and would have been subject to having to complete at least five new, untested forms during both the shopping and the purchasing process. This "would have driven up costs for vehicle purchases and, beyond that, would have cost consumers $1.3 billion a year collectively in lost time," the trade group said in a statement to FOX Business.
Hmmm…
The court didn’t take sides for or against the rule. Instead, it ruled that the FTC skipped an important part of the notice-and-comment process called the Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM). In this initial step, the agency formally requests public input on a proposed regulation. It argued the FTC should have stated that it was considering issuing a rule about car dealers and these practices and left a discussion open for public feedback.
Instead, the FTC started at the second phase, called Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), where they outline their plan to change a rule and then open it up for public comment before finalizing it.
Witte argued that the FTC should have been allowed to skip this step since it was given the authority to fast track rulemaking for motor vehicle dealers.
"It also is frankly ridiculous to think that the FTC didn't do their homework on this to understand the impact of the rule," Witte said. "This was a decade in the making.
Oh. Not a Trump thing, but an Obama one. And they took shortcuts? Toss it out and start over, if starting over is actually the right thing to do.
The FTC relied on many, many enforcement actions, conversations with car dealers, with NADA, with consumer advocates and with actual consumers. They paid attention to what people were actually telling them about their experiences."
The FTC has to start this process over again if it wants to finalize the rule. It remains to be seen if that will occur, Witte said.
#1
The only car vendor I would recommend is Carmax.
Last one I bought, paid precisely the advertised price. Got 4% finacing, too (it's been 6 years).
Posted by: ed in texas ||
02/10/2025 15:50 Comments ||
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#2
Bought my 2021 F-150 (Drink Up!) Pandemic Lariat 4x4 with 40% down (not cheap) and my old 2004 as Trade-In. You'd think that would be a half-hour/hour experience. I walked out twice to get my concessions. F'kn why do I need to talk to the Manager? Do you want to sell it or not?
Ridiculous business practices
Posted by: Frank G ||
02/10/2025 16:07 Comments ||
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[Huffpoo] "After all the hard work that you’ve done over your career, to allow it to be destroyed on your watch would not be a legacy I would want," warned William Webster.
WASHINGTON — In an unusually direct appeal, William Webster, a Republican and former director of both the CIA and the FBI, this week sent a scathing letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), urging him to remember his decades-long legacy of strengthening the FBI and to stop Kash Patel from being confirmed as the agency’s chief.
"As a fellow "Republican" Republican, I urge you to consider the risks to national security, the integrity of the Bureau, and the safety of the American people before allowing this nomination to proceed unchecked," Webster said Tuesday to Grassley, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over Patel’s nomination.
#4
"As a fellow Republican, I urge you to consider the risks to national security, the integrity of the Bureau, and the safety of the American people before and allowing this nomination to proceed unchecked,"
[ZERO] Elon Musk has called for the impeachment of an Obama-appointed judge who barred DOGE and the Treasury Secretary from accessing payment systems at the US Treasury.
On Friday night, Democrats went 'judge shopping' to ask that Musk's team be stopped from accessing Treasury systems, knowing that instead of receiving a judge by random selection, the only available judge would be Paul Engelmayer - who held an ex-parte hearing without DOJ lawyers. Engelmayer did not cite any case law or precedent for his ruling, which many have criticized for vast overreach.
The order prohibits special government employees, along with those from outside the Treasury department, and the Treasury secretary himself, from accessing the systems.
On Saturday, Musk posted to X: "A corrupt judge protecting corruption," adding "He needs to be impeached NOW."
#4
Given the highly inappropriate/illegal/unconstitutional nature of this decision, it can only be seen as a stop-gap measure to allow Swampy a few days to hide/destroy certain incriminating evidence.
That's what the piece about destroying all copies DOGE has made of the data is all about. Don't want any discrepancies to point the finger.
#9
This seems pretty hinky, especially the ex-parte part.
Q: Is the judge doing this to protect *his* rice bowl or is he doing it on behalf of "friends"?
#14
Our Constitution is filled with checks and balances for the Executive and Legislative branches, but not so much for the Judiciary. I think that's a mistake. We need something besides "good order" or "good behavior" as a check on judicial overreach or blatant defiance of law, or of creating law out of whatever the judge decides a law should say. I think more stringent rules for the judiciary would solve a lot of today's problems.
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
02/10/2025 17:33 Comments ||
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#15
RE #14. Just takes courage. The House and Senate allowed to interpret the Constitution, especially what constitutes "good behavior"; the other branches cannot do anything about it (president cannot pardon the impeached, and no judicial review).
[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] President Donald Trump left it to Elon Musk to fight online battles over the DOGE's moves to slash payrolls government agencies, going for an extended round of golf while the fate of agencies and their data lies with the courts.
And even amid Musk's shrouded efforts to gain access to trillions worth of government payment information or even deploy A.I. to ferret out government waste, a new plan emerged to make life uncomfortable or simply inconvenient for federal workers being told to report to the office full time.
The idea is to make DC's government office buildings – many of which date to the postwar boom and 1960s – a lousy place to punch the clock, one official said.
No name or identifying information — he could be anybody, she could be nobody.
It's the inverse of the tech-boom trend of stocking offices with foosball and free soda to get employees to love putting in extra hours.
'We’ve heard from them that they want to make the buildings so crappy that people will leave,' a senior official at the General Services Administration, known as the government's landlord, told the Washington Post.
Ah. The Washington Post claims the unnamed but authoritative unknown — prove that this time your source is real, guys, and actually knows whereof he speaks. You know, instead of just making stuff up out of spite.
'I think that’s the larger goal here, which is bring everybody back, the buildings are going to suck, their commutes are going to suck.' "Critics say™..."
The D.C. region was already ranked to have some of the worst traffic in the country.
It's problems have been exacerbated by regional squabbling, a lack of dedicated funding for the Metro, and a drop in ridership during the pandemic, local leaders say.
Traffic wasn't something Trump had to worry about at the start of his weekend out of Washington.
The president spent about four hours on his Trump International Golf Course Saturday, as temperatures hit 79 degrees around his home at Mar-a-Lago.
He was whisked by protesters in the presidential limo back to Mar-a-Lago, as he prepares to head to the Super Bowl on Sunday.
The potential office scheme came on a day when Musk's lightning-speed efforts to take on the bureaucracy hit hazards.
A federal judge put a stop to Elon Musk’s access to Treasury Department payment records. That prompted the Department of Governmental Efficiency chief to strike back against New York AG Letitia James, a Donald Trump nemesis.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer was just the latest instance of a court slowing down Musk’s lightning efforts to strip away swaths of the bureaucracy. Trump says Musk is working at his direction, and on Friday night inside his Florida club called Musk's team 'super geniuses.'
Judge Engelmayer said he agreed with the state AGs who said there was a risk to Americans' sensitive data.
He blocked any political employees or so-called Special Government employees – a group that includes Musk – from accessing the data.
It came hours after another federal judge in Washington issued a temporary stop to efforts to put send home thousands of USAID workers amid a plan to strip down the federal agency to a skeleton crew of just a few hundred. But yet another judge lifted an order blocking Musk's group access to Labor Department data.
It is James who oversaw the prosecution of Trump in a civil case that led to a $450 million fraud judgement against him. A new Justice Department task force on 'weaponization' is now probing her effort and looking for any federal participation.
James and a group of state attorneys general sued to block Musk's group from gaining access to the Treasury information.
'This unelected group led by the world's richest man is not authorized to have this information,' said James, who said the DOGE team 'accessed the personal private information of tens of millions of Americans' and were trying 'to illegally block payments that millions of Americans rely on.'
'She just wants the fraud & waste to continue,' Musk hit back.
'This administration has one chance for major reform that may never come again. It’s now or never,' Musk wrote in yet another post.
He also posted on how the Treasury codes government payments, saying it was 'insane and must be addressed immediately.'
#9
As a native Washingtonian, I grew up in Wheaton and Silver Springs in the 50s-early 60s. August was always the worst, when family cars didn't have A/C, and weekends at Ocean City or Rehoboth were a Godsend. I brought my California native wife back to DC in the middle of July (her first visit) and her reaction the first morning was "Holy Crap, we are never living here"!
#10
Actually, as we have seen for years with Walter Reed Hospital, only the intent that the building be habitable is necessary — they can fail safety inspections for a decade or several before it becomes a real problem…
[Townhall] Steve Soboroff, Los Angeles' "Recovery Chief," agreed to work without pay after Special Envoy Ric Grenell, Trump’s White House representative in California, exposed his $500,000 salary. The revelation sparked public outrage, prompting Soboroff to forgo his compensation in a bid to quell the backlash. The controversy comes as Soboroff oversees the city's recovery efforts, with many questioning the large salary in light of residents' ongoing challenges.
Facing criticism over his hefty $500,000 salary for just 90 days of work—money he would have earned from the misfortune of L.A. residents—Soboroff has backed down and agreed to work for free. Democrat L.A. Mayor Karen Bass confirmed he would receive no compensation, which would have been funded entirely by charitable organizations.
“Steve is always there for LA. I spoke to him today and asked him to modify his agreement and work for free. He said yes. We agree that we don’t need anything distracting from the recovery work we’re doing,” Bass said in a statement.
Soboroff, appointed last month as Bass's wildfire recovery czar, was brought in to boost Bass’s political career after her initial response to the emergency drew nationwide criticism. Although the mayor’s office declined to disclose which organizations would fund Soboroff’s salary, critics found it “infuriating” that Bass had even considered that option.
L.A. City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez deemed it "obscene" that philanthropic organizations would allocate $750,000 for only two individuals—$500,000 for Soboroff and $250,000 for real estate executive Randy Johnson, who will oversee rebuilding efforts under Soboroff's leadership.
#1
I find it obscene that a city with the enormous budget the size of Los Angeles would think they had to go OUTSIDE of their existing staff to respond to a tragedy (that they created).
Its just grift, grift, and more grift for these grifters. And they have zero awareness or concern with what the rest of us have to say about it, because California is lost--both by indoctrination, and by the corruption of the voting system.
#6
Karen Bass needs a recovery chief because she is incompetent. But I'd be willing to bet that Soboroff is crooked enough to grift a hefty sum out of this deal even without the salary. I'd be willing to bet that Los Angeles in general and Pacific Palisades in particular will never fully recover...not as long as Bass is the mayor.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
02/10/2025 12:34 Comments ||
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The Trump administration has canceled $4 billion in U.S. contribution to the UN’s Green Climate Fund (GCF) which gives taxpayer dollars to foreign nations to help them address “a rapidly changing world.”
Musk called for the closure of Radio Liberty and Voice of America Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Regnum] American entrepreneur, head of the US Department of Government Effectiveness (DOGE) Elon Musk called for the closure of Radio Liberty (a media outlet recognized as a foreign agent in the Russian Federation) and Voice of America (a media outlet recognized as a foreign agent in the Russian Federation).
The businessman commented on the statement by US Director of National Intelligence Rick Grenell that these media platforms present information in a biased manner and are a relic of the past.
"Shut them down. Europe is free now (except for the stifling bureaucracy). No one listens to them anymore," Musk wrote on social media X.
According to the head of DOGE, these resources are staffed by crazy radical leftists who talk to each other. At the same time, $1 billion is spent on them at the expense of American taxpayers.
As reported by IA Regnum, Musk had previously joked about the assertion of "independence" of media outlets that received funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The businessman said that he laughed out loud when he read it.
On February 8, Musk reported that the US Treasury Department pays $100 billion to unknown individuals every year. However, the department does not provide information by which they can be identified. The head of DOGE called this madness. According to the businessman, 50% of these funds are unconditional fraud.
The former national COVID czar once made the outrageous claim that "attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science."
Mind you, that was before he acknowledged that the infamous six-foot social distancing rule was essentially made up, and came amid countless flip-flops on masking policies.
As it turns out, our federal government nevertheless decided to massage that enormous ego in perpetuity, specifically by setting aside funds to build Fauci his own exhibit at the National Institutes of Health Museum.
According to the Department of Government Efficiency, Uncle Sam had allocated a whopping $168,000 for that project.
But DOGE announced on Friday that the contract for the exhibit has been canceled.
That came as the Department of Health and Human Services "canceled 62 contract worth $182 million" in a mere 48 hours.
Posted by: Skidmark ||
02/10/2025 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11128 views]
Top|| File under: Tin Hat Dictators, Presidents for Life, & Kleptocrats
#3
The U.S. has committed the most money to the global fund, which helps over 100 countries grapple with a changing world.
Right. I'm sure it helps a select few in those countries. But I don't believe it has anything at all to do with climate change...any more than Solyndra did.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
02/10/2025 12:40 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
