J. Burden

Ben Shapiro lost 90% of his viewership so now he’s making content like this

I regularly buy, sell, refurbish, and collect cars. I also have teenagers who are new drivers saving for their own. The state of the used P2P market is that anything offered under $3500 is VERY sketch, and that traces directly back to cash-4-clunkers hard-deleting the bottom end of the used market. Yes, boomers, the market effect is still cascading onward almost 20 years later. You can almost kinda sorta get a passable Honda or Mazda in the $6500 range in most areas. If you have a VERY trustable mechanic, you can get a $4k Odyssey and spend half a grand to have him sort it out. ($1500 if it needs the timing belt done, which it probably does.) Unless you jackpot somehow on FB marketplace that's the effective bottom end of the market for a normie buyer. "Just buy a Toyota" everyone knows they are awesome so they don't tend to be sold used unless they are VERY thrashed or something very wrong with it. Only safe used path to a Toyota is CPO which is 4-6 years old and still $20k+ in most cases. Trust me I'd be buying up every Taco in town if they didn't keep showing up completely rusted through or with 5 accidents on the carfax. Because the better ones... aren't for sale! "Just get a repo or theft recovery from the insurance auction" oh I assure you I am a copart FIEND and there's a reason most people are not. Bottom line is the average daily driving human isn't a car mechanic and can't buy a car and then restore it before using it. There are financial and practical obstacles that put this option out of reach for most. In the simplest and most direct terms, cash 4 clunkers exerted permanent upward price pressure on the bottom end of the used car market. C4C is probably responsible for the $500 beater being a $2500 beater in 2026, and inflation accounts for it being a $3500 beater instead.