Some thoughts on cash for clunkers

[Thunder22]

You would think that we would have learned the lesson after encouraging people to finance houses that they can't afford that the Government wouldn't encourage people to buy cars that they can't afford.

People are going from having no car payment at all and minimal insurance premiums to a car payment of $200-400 per month and they now have to have full coverage insurance costing them another $100-200 per month. We went from someone paying nothing per month to own their car, to someone paying $300-600 a month. And if the new purcahser can afford that monthly payment, they surely didn't deserve to be included in the benefit of the $3500-$4500 welfare, oops, incentive payment.

Maybe I should start a repo business, in about 6 months it's probably going to be a thriving business.

By the way:
Article 1, Section 8 of the "Constitution for the United States of America" clearly spells out the government's power to lay and collect taxes. It clearly spells out that taxes can be collected to pay for the military, to pay for the postal service, to pay for roadways, etc.

It DOES NOT provide for the Cash for Clunkers program.

And why are the cars being junked? *Some* of the cars are perfectly good vehicles. Between charities and stripping off the good used parts, someone could benefit from them. Don't use car dealers and body shop owners deserve a break? How are they going to make a living without cars to sell and parts to fix the cars that come in?Why not sell them to some developing country? Cuba seems to need vehicles that were made after 1957, how about sell them to them and recoup some of the tax money?

This program actually hurts the lower and lower middle class as it's eliminating/junking the only cars that they can afford to buy and use. Where's the outcry over that? I thought the Democrats were intent on helping those groups of people?

Shall we move on to the environment?

The clunker is already a sunk "cost" to the environment, it already exists, the energy and raw materials needed to produce the car have already been used. The new car must be produced, using more energy and resources, does the better mpg saving over the clunker offset that? Absolutely not. Where are the crushed cars going to reside? That's right, in a landfill. Do you want to discuss how bad that is for the environment?

So tell me again, without mentioning Bush, other than the "feel good" aspects of yet another welfare program, how exactly has cash for clunkers been successfull?

Before you answer, here are some stats for you:

Using 2005 DOT statistics:

Vehicles on the road 238,697,097
New Registrations 16,690,280

Using the $3,500 threshold for the entire one billion dollars would net 285,714 new vehicles and conversely the same amount of clunkers.

That is a whopping .1197% of vehicles on the road in 2005 and a whopping 1.7119% of the new registrations of 2005.

That kind of smacks you in the face huh? $1B, soon to be $3 or $4B to have a less than .2% impact on the road and less than 2% of new registrations.

So tell me again how wasting $1-3B on top of what the government already wastes is in any way a good thing?