September 6, 2018

How Are Auto Sales Doing These Days?

I’m stuck in the infusion center for the day, so blogging will probably be a little slow today. This has nothing to do with having an IV drip hanging off my arm, and everything to do with being forced to use my tablet’s on-screen keyboard instead of the awesome mechanical switch keyboard connected to my desktop machine.

(Just as I wrote those words, the pharmacy finally delivered the IV bags containing the meds. So I should get out of here around 1 pm, just in time for an East Coast late-day document dump.)

Anyway, I decided to kill some time by checking in on the auto industry to see how it’s doing. First up, here are domestic auto sales:

Down, down, down! Nobody want ordinary cars anymore, not if they’re produced in America, anyway. Now here’s a chart that shows everything: both car and light truck sales (including SUVs), domestic and imported:

Sales reached a high of 18 million in 2016, but have drifted down to 17 million since then. The beginning of 2018 started out weakly, with sales of about 16.5 million vehicles. Part of this might be due to financing. Interest rates are drifting up:

And the total amount being financed is growing:

A few years ago, people were financing $26,000 at 4%. Today it’s more like $30,000 at 5%. Roughly speaking, that’s a difference of $480 per month vs. $570 per month. That’s more than $1,000 per year. Given the sluggish wage growth of the past few years, this makes it hardly surprising that auto and truck sales are sluggish too. It hardly matters if “the economy” is doing well when your personal paycheck isn’t going up but the price of a car is. MAGA.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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