For years I’ve been wondering how so many people can afford to such expensive cars, with 40, 50, $60,000 SUVs running around.  Now I know.  They can’t.  It’s hard to believe but there is something even more idiotic than the real estate bubble.  I wrote an Autoblog post that went up today about people who frequently buy new vehicles and rollover debt to the new car loan.  Imagine buying a $30,000 car that’s worth at most $20K two years later. But you still owe $23K on the loan.  Take that $3,000 and tack it on to the loan on a new $35,000 vehicle that you put no down payment on .  Rinse and repeat a couple of times.  Now all of a sudden, after 6 or 7 years, you’ve made tens of thousands of dollars in car payments, your vehicle has a trade-in value of $27,000 and you have a $40,000 loan balance.  Hard as it might be to believe, a lot of people and banks apparently are this stupid.  I’ve never bought a new car when I still owed money on the previous one so the thought of doing anything so ridiculous never even occurred to me.  It’s mind boggling how stupid this capitalist system has made us.  Just wait until India and China catch up!