In my day, if you wanted to buy a car, you just opened up the "newspaper" to the "classified ads" section and looked under "used cars." (Later, you had to find some money also.) Things change. These days, none of those things in quotation marks exist any more.

Turns out that finding a nice used car to buy these days is harder than... I dunno... harder than some of the hard materials, metals and whatnot, that might be used to produce a car. Why? Because when you try to steal one, whoops, turns out the owner has a gun in the glove compartment. This is America, after all. And also because of the recession. From the WSJ:

The shortage of used cars stems from the deep plunge in new-car sales between 2008 and 2010, and the virtual disappearance of new-car leases during the financial crisis. As a result, three-year-old cars are now hard to find and even older models are holding their value.

They're holding their value so god damn well that cars that are just a few years old are almost as expensive as new cars, so what's the point? You'd be better off just taking your town's extensive and affordable 24-hour mass transit system to work, as we do here in New York. "Be more like New York City" is the clear answer, once again.

Or, move to Europe, where they have the opposite problem.

[WSJ. Photo: John Lloyd/ Flickr]