fast1

Anyway, I'd be happy to point out that both US political parties have had huge amounts of involvement in screwing things up through bad revenue policy, high government spending, bonus wars, bad fiscal policy (Fed), trade policy, etc., so I'm not trying for any party-based mud-slinging, and that the only rational response is to get yourself a 911 while you can and forget about this kind of cr4p while enjoying the sound of the flat 6 behind you. It's certainly my approach.

Alexis de Tocqueville got it right a couple centuries ago.
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”

So what's the solution? Buy a Porsche if you can afford one because that may not be the case in a few years.




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

futurz

Or as Mark Twain said, a govt that robs Peter to pay Paul, can always count on the support of Paul.

SSST

A former neighbor of mine has one. Blue with white stripes. After a couple of weeks he had a rattle on the passenger side and I was the only one he knew who he trusted to drive it while he hunted down the rattle.

It might be the most pure vehicle I have ever driven. Amazing machine. You are a lucky man.

Alstoy

My '05 997 C2 base started at about $75k. The one I got stickered at about $95k. I managed to get about 10% off. The 991 base is about $85k. $10k for a model year difference isn't that bad. Options can kill you, as they add up quickly. I'm hunting for a very lightly optioned (PDK & SC only) base car and the sticker is not that far off of what my 997 stickered for. I'm not that big into options that don't add to performance, but to each his own.

greenpdk

How true. This is the biggest problem we have right now.

Sorry

rijowysock

why would you build a 143k carrera S? just wait for the new turbo where half that stuff will be standard..

not sure why people build them as such, my first 997 was a used 05 cab.. original sticker 120k... it was 45k... right next to it was a 90k sticker cab... they were asking 43k for it.

30k in options turned into 2k in the long run... and the original owner probably didn't even own it very long.

id get the most bang for my 143k buck.. at the end of the day it's the same frame as an 82k 911.. u just added a lot of painted bits and wires.

kosmo

bingo

Comprador

I want a normally aspirated car with RWD.. had a GT3 on order but hate PDK for the street. simple as that i guess

chuck911

Well aside from the expected diversions into features and are options worth it there seem to be a lot more people this time actually getting the impact of fiat currency on ever-rising prices. I was pretty sure nobody would take me up on my prod to compare original past 911 prices in terms of real money (gold) vs fiat federal reserve notes. Really, with the net its not hard to find tables of annual average gold price and look up original 911 prices. Starting arbitrarily with the first model year and then every 10 years:
year gold 911 oz
1965 $35 7700 220
1975 161 10000 62
1985 317 32000 100
1995 383 59900 156
2005 445 69300 156
2011 1571 78000 50
today 1602 84300 52

This shows clearly that today's 911, for all its immense improvements in performance, is very near in real terms to the lowest it has ever cost in its entire near half century of production. Another completely independent line of inquiry would indicate the same- simply go on You-Tube and search for videos of the old factory compared to new production. Where once weeks of parts sat stacked and moved around by hand today parts come in on rail and robots move them into position mere minutes before they are needed. This is the normal path of human endeavor. Where free markets are allowed to operate methods constantly improve driving down the cost of ever-improving products.

This was the case throughout most of US history up until 1913. The reason it is "most" not "all" is due to the occasional wars (which in the past actually were occasional not ongoing as today, for which there is a reason, read on) which were always financed with paper currency. But back then everyone so hated the resulting inflation that the war and paper currency were retired as soon as possible. Google the charts, you will see flat line zero inflation, in fact trending deflation (the same money buys more goods) with only occasional war blips.

By the time Porsche came along of course we were already well on our way with fiat currency, and that is why 911 prices have been a one-way street when denominated in fiat currency. When denominated in gold however (or real Constitutional money, silver) its a different story.

I highly encourage people to google around and look up some of these facts, as it is incredibly educational. These charts show clearly the constancy of prices and purchasing power (with the occasional blips) right up until about 1913. What happened in 1913? The Federal Reserve was created. Oh. And the IRS! Because, you see, you cannot have debt based paper money without also creating the means of extracting taxes from the citizens to pay for it.

Once this is all in place it really does not matter which party is in office, as the real power lies in the ability to create money out of nothing.... and collect interest on it from people who cannot create it and therefore must work to earn it. Now wars are easy to finance, and in fact the more wars the more debt based money the more taxes and the more the earnings of the bank that creates the money out of nothing.

So 1. don't complain about Porsche prices. Porsche is in fact doing an incredibly good job keeping prices down on what would surely be a multi-million dollar car if built the way they were in the beginning. and 2. if you want to save for a Porsche buy gold. Or silver. And 3. place blame where it belongs, on the Federal Reserve Bank, a bank which is neither Federal nor a bank, is private (and foreign owned at that!) and does not even have any reserves!

ncamg

I just did a simple calculation to see if we (US) pay more for Porsches because we have a weak currency. I went on the Porsche web site and priced a C2s cab. In the US it is $110,800. In the UK it is £91,763. Using the current exchange rate of 1.51 dollars to the pound that makes it $138,562. Subtracting the 20% VAT (I love Europe taxes) you get $115,468. Or roughly $5K more in the UK than the US. I would suggest that Porsche prices have gone up because of market supply and demand rather than US currency policy. By the way, if you like the 20% VAT the table below provides UK tax rates. Now you do get about a £10K personal exemption before these tax rates are applied. What I like is that the lower tax rate upper limit is going down over time, so you hit the 40% rate sooner. Also they decreased the max rate in April 2013 from 50% to 45%. So at £32K
($48K) you hit the 40% rate. In the US (married) you have to hit $68K before you hit the 25% rate.




Rate 2011 to 2012 tax year 2012 to 2013 tax year 2013 to 2014 tax year
Basic rate 20% £0 to £35,000 £0 to £34,370 £0 to £32,010
Higher rate 40% £35,001 to £150,000 £34,371 to £150,000 £32,011 to £150,000
Additional rate 50% Over £150,000 Over £150,000 Over £150,000
(45% from 6 April 2013)

So yes Porsches have gotten a lot more expensive in recent years but …they are still more affordable here than in Europe. Just think about how much you got to make after taxes to write that £91,763 ($138,562) check.

gulrey

You could just as easily use "S&P500" currency as the so called "Fiat" currency as they have both appreciated about the same since 1965.

chuck911

Nope. Wrong. Not even close. Not that its your fault for thinking this. You're merely repeating the nonsense spouted by talking heads across the spectrum of so-called journalists and others who never learned a thing about money- or rather more accurately never seriously thought about what they have been told.

What are the functions of money? What makes one thing suitable as money and another not?

Money needs to serve as a unit of account. It needs to be fungible, any one unit the same as any other, and divisible. It must serve as a unit of exchange, to buy and sell. And it must be a store of value: any one unit of money should be able to but about the same amount of goods even over long periods of time.

Something like the S&P index clearly fails on several counts. But what's really amazing is how badly this thing we think of as money (Federal Reserve Notes, aka the dollar) fails as money!

There are records going back literally thousands of years indicating a unit (ounce or whatever) of gold being able to buy a really nice toga, or number of loaves of bread, or whatever, pretty much equal to what one could buy with that same unit today. Store of value over more than a thousand years.

Now not only was the S&P index not around a thousand years ago, its not even around today. That is, the stocks that comprise the index are not the same today as they were in the past. People choose what goes into the index. Totally subject to manipulation. Gold on the other hand cannot be created, can only be mined at great cost of labor and capital and has very few uses other than as jewelry and a store of value- and even a lot of the jewelry is ultimately a store of value.

Even the next closest item on the list, silver, which has actually been used as money longer and in more cultures than gold, is not as good a candidate for money as gold. The problem is that there so many industrial uses for silver, a lot of which result in it being used very small quantities, too small to be worth recycling, so that silver tends to be used up. Gold on the other hand, virtually all that has been mined in all history is still around, and it is because of this fact, combined with a very constant low mine rate, that the worlds inventory is very large and stable.

All these factors and more are encompassed in the simple expression: gold is money.

86 3point2

I'm about to pull the trigger on a new MY12 991S - MSRP 115K, sell 94.5...I think Porsche is helping dealers move the leftovers. That should help most of year one depreciation. I ordered an S6 in December that is optioned up to the same price point but doesnt arrive until mid-Mar....I'm thinking the 991S is a reasonable alternative to the Audi as a daily driver.

chuckbdc

Sounds like a deal! I got a good one at the start of 2012- exactly one year ago today- as the dealer wanted to move the car to get some exposure. There are always deals around on cars in stock if one looks, and one is willing to forego building a dream car.

mrstep

I also apologize in advance for:

Spot on. Any currency that allows the simple 'creation' of more of it has a deep fundamental problem - the only way that the newly 'created' money has any value is because it takes away that value from other holders of the same currency. It's such a basic scam - just bleed the value out from under people. (Of course, you can't only print it or it will collapse in much shorter order, so you set up direct payroll deductions for taxes so that people don't notice how much is being taken... also very clever in how it plays on human nature. If a tax collector still had to make the rounds to take 30%+ of what you earned every year, I'm guessing tax rates would be lower...)

Sorry, OP, I blame chuck911 for so correctly expounding on one of my personal pet peeves, and the price question of the car just really highlights the issue. And I'm totally serious that getting enjoyment out of the money you earned is a more sound decision in most cases than putting it in places where it will be taken from you coming and going anyway. At least you can enjoy the 911, otherwise someone else is just taking the value of your earnings and probably giving themselves that 911 as a bonus for being so clever.