Say Anything Blog

Because - surprise, surprise - the massive subsidy to buy new cars was being used up too quickly.  And the government, always a marvel of efficiency, couldn’t keep up.

Oh, and the $1 billion in deficit spending allocated for the program may already be used up.

WASHINGTON – The government plans to suspend its popular “cash for clunkers” program amid concerns it could quickly use up the $1 billion in rebates for new car purchases, congressional officials said Thursday.

The Transportation Department called lawmakers’ offices to alert them to the decision to suspend the program at midnight Thursday. The program offers owners of old cars and trucks $3,500 or $4,500 toward a new, more fuel-efficient vehicle.

The congressional officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Rae Tyson, a spokesman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which administers the program, declined comment. ...

Through late Wednesday, 22,782 vehicles had been purchased through the program and nearly $96 million had been spent. But dealers raised concerns about large backlogs in the processing of the deals in the government system, prompting the suspension.

A survey of 2,000 dealers by the National Automobile Dealers Association found about 25,000 deals had not yet approved by NHTSA, or nearly 13 trades per store. It raised concerns that with about 23,000 dealers taking part in the program, auto dealers may already have surpassed the 250,000 vehicle sales funded by the $1 billion program.

What’s horribly ironic about this is that the government is essentially subsidizing overconsumption.  The whole idea behind “cash for clunkers” was to save us all from an impending global warming apocalypse with a subsidy to get people to trade in their older, gas-guzzling vehicles for newer, more efficient vehicles.  The problem is that it really ended up convincing a bunch of people with perfectly serviceable vehicles to decide to trade them in on new vehicles and cash in on a giant subsidy of other people’s money.

So new cars are being manufactured to meet artificially created demand.  And all the cars being traded in are either going to end up being destroyed, or will end up as a gigantic glut in the used car market.  Either way, this fiasco is resulting in a bunch of cars being made that we didn’t really need.

And that’s not exactly in the spirit of environmentalism, no?

But hey, let’s put these idiots in charge of health care!