Your tax dollars at work: $1,000,000,000 to destroy functioning automobiles
Lawmakers love laws. They love to write ‘em, love to pass ‘em, love to amend ‘em. But the one law they seem to completely ignore is the Law of Unintended Consequences.
ABC’s brilliant John Stossel explains the unfortunate intersection of Cash-for-Clunkers and the Law of Unintended Consequences:
Another unintended consequence of the Cash for Clunkers program is that poor people who can’t afford new cars – or expensive used cars — will be crushed along with all those clunkers. If you can only afford $500 – $1,000 for a car, you’ll find many of these vehicles are now unavailable. They have been sent to the junk yard thanks to this program.
Nobel Prize for Economics, coming up.
Source: John Stossel
Subscribe, tweet, share, tell a friend!
Browse before and after this article
OLDER: Headline of the Day“Clinton begins Africa tour in Kenya”
NEWER:
Related Posts
- 13 unintended consequences of Cash-For-Clunkers
- Cash-for-Clunkers: Wrong for so many reasons
- “Cash-for-Clunkers…is horseshit beyond repair”
- Car dealer survey says Cash-for-Clunkers is a lemon
- Obama can’t close the deal, New York dealers say no more Cash-for-Clunkers
{ 1 trackback }
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Yes, and this scheme makes no energy or environmental sense either !
It’s of course a pity that dealers are forced to destroy perfectly good cars.
But there are deeper reasons why the scheme is wrong.
Presumably it’s to save on oil/gasolene and to lower emissions:
Yet fuel efficient cars effectively means cheaper energy which – as shown by general English and Scottish research referred to below – in turn means they will be used more (instead of, for example, using public transport)
Fuel efficiency is of course an advantage people can consider when buying a car – and can compare with advantages that inefficient cars can have (better acceleration, or greater safety because of greater weight, etc, as well as a probably lower price – or they would be efficient already).
As far as government is concerned, any oil shortage – for geopolitical or economic demand reasons – raises the gasolene price and – guess what – increases demand for fuel-efficient cars anyway, no need to legislate for it.
Another reason is that – as research at Georgia Tech has shown – it is possible to clean emissions of CO2 (and other substances at the same time).
A fuel-neutral emission tax on cars therefore makes more sense:
If it is economical to make – or to fit current- gas-guzzling cars with emission processing then, again, there is no reason for government to try to lower the use of such cars.
Any regulatory measures should therefore focus on emissions, rather than the fuel used, and emission taxation on cars retains consumer choice, while also giving significant government income with the lower sales of high emission cars, income that can go to projects that themselves lower emissions eg. electric car manufacturing subsidies etc.
(Regardless of whether CO2 reduction makes any sense, lowered emissions of course have their own benefit, for all the noxious sulphur etc substances that the emissions also contain)
For more see ceolas.net/#cc25x
Why all energy efficiency regulation is wrong – from light bulbs to buildings http://www.ceolas.net/#cc2x
No one even mentions the huge resource and energy costs to produce a new car vs. the much smaller energy costs in to maintain an older car.
This program is akin digging holes and filling them up again. No production; just “make-work.” At least they should give the cars to Cubans, who know how to extract the most from an old vehicle.
know there trying to increase the spending on this program by 2 billion? ridiculous…
cash for clunkers extension
I thought it was to $4 Billion. What a success! These guys are brilliant. Who would have thought that giving away money would be so damn popular?
Why stop at $4 Billion. It $1 Billion is great, and $4 Billion is better, wouldn’t $100 Billion be super-duper and save the world!
Now I hear that they want to limit the “cash4clunkers” offer to only the “poor” … Have they learned nothing from the fannie/freddie real estate bubble they created???
So we’re going to coax poor people into signing for 6 year car loans they can’t afford just so they can get a $4,500 gift?
And when they can’t make the payments, we’ll hear: “Those predatory evil conservatives sold the poor people cars they can’t afford!!!”
Believe me, the people who drive clunkers out of necessity can’t *afford* payments….or they probably wouldn’t be driving them in the first place.
Of course, they could just give up living in buildings and live in their new, green cars instead. Think of all the energy that would be saved by not needing to heat a house or apartment anymore.
This just in, read it on Twitter:
Coburn amndt 2 allow traded-in “Clunkers” vehicles 2 b donated to charities, poor families, defeated, 41-56.
RE Ray
“No one even mentions the huge resource and energy costs to produce a new car vs. the much smaller energy costs in to maintain an older car.
This program is akin digging holes and filling them up again. No production; just “make-work.” At least they should give the cars to Cubans, who know how to extract the most from an old vehicle.”
Good points Ray!