The Boston Globe's token conservative, Jeff Jacoby delivers a lovely indictment of Obama's "Cash for Clunkers" debacle in a column today.Congress and the Obama administration trumpeted Cash for Clunkers as a triumph -- the president pronounced it "successful beyond anybody's imagination." Which it was, if you define success as getting people to take "free" money to make a purchase most of them are going to make anyway, while simultaneously wiping out productive assets that could provide value to many other consumers for years to come. By any rational standard, however, this program was sheer folly.Jacoby points out the obvious flaw in the program, predicted by so many outside of the administration, that removing thousands of perfectly good cars from the road would only serve to increase the price of used cars:
the supply of used cars is far lower than it would be if your Uncle Sam hadn't decided last year to destroy hundreds of thousands of perfectly good automobiles as part of its hare-brained Car Allowance Rebate System -- or, as most of us called it, Cash for Clunkers.Oh, but it helped the environment, right, to get all these so-called clunkers off the road? Well, not so much:
Using Department of Transportation figures, meanwhile, the Associated Press calculated that replacing low-mpg "clunkers" with new cars getting higher mileage would reduce CO2 emissions by around 700,000 tons a year -- less than Americans emit in a single hour. Likewise, the projected reduction in gasoline use amounted to about as much as Americans go through in 4½ hours.So, the program did nothing to help the environment; is now hurting the poor and middle class who buy used cars; did not cause a marked increase in car sales; yet cost you, the tax payer, some $3 Billion.
Researchers at the University of California-Davis calculated that the reduction of carbon dioxide attributable to the program (under best-case assumptions) cost at least $237 per ton. That is more than 10 times the going rate on the international market, where carbon emissions credits currently cost about $20 per ton.
In the end, Jacoby says it best:
When all is said and done, Cash for Clunkers was a deplorable exercise in budgetary wastefulness, asset destruction, environmental irrelevance, and economic idiocy. Other than that, it was a screaming success.A perfect symbol of the Obama presidency.
2 comments:
When I needed a "new" car I shopped around and purchased a 2001 Jeep Cherokee. I get 17-19 MPG. For me to have transportation zero grams of iron, aluminum, nickle, candium, iradium or any other metal, heavy, precious or otherwise was mined, transported, smelted processed, cast or machined. Zero yards of petroleum based plastics or fabrics were woven, spun, injected, molded or stitched. Again, these things that were not produced required no diesel to be transported in trucks or trains. No rubber was farmed or formed and no glass smelted (or whatever they do to it). Because I bought this vehicle zero grams of metal, glass, plastic cloth or rubber of any kind was transported or placed in any land fill any where in the world. Zero grams of carbon was produced processing, disposing of or recycling any of these parts. The largest "impact" that I had on the environment that purchasing tat car made was when I took it on a test drive. Stick THAT in your Prius!
But, Noreaster, what about your 15 MPG? You are contributing mightily to the non-existent man-made global-warming crisis! Egad!
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