Cash 4 Clunkers: $24K per car by taxpayers

I made this point weeks ago It's nice to see that it's finally getting some traction. The whole plan was ill conceived and piss poorly administered. Who ever thought this up in the first place is a an idiot who comes up with a plan to stimulate American car sales and allows foreign cars to be included in the program.
Add this to the massive and growing list failures of the Obama and Dim (no spell error) plans.
It kind fits right in with the ultimately over overwhelmingly stupid idea to raise taxes, fees, or the cost of anything when the economy is in the gutter. What does it take to get these absolute fools to understand the to stimulate growth you don't make it harder for people to buy because you are taxing hell out them to pay for dumb programs like this one, the "I don't really care about you Health Plan" or the pending "Cap and Tax you to death Plan". It would be comical if it weren't going to drag this country down to third world status. But then that seems to be Obama's ultimate goal.

jackalope said:

I question the comparison 'to the historical relationship of those vehicles to total SAAR' for two reasons. One, what was happening in the industry bore no relationship to historical data, the industry was in crisis. Two, the environmental qualifications for what vehicles qualified could have (likely did?) effect what cars were purchased.

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Another question...

Looking at historical sales data that include tradeins worth more than $4,500 should be excluded from the SAAR to keep everything on a level playing field.

Maybe they did, maybe they didn't, it's not clear one way or the other.

I don't think too many people would participate in a program that would only give them credit of $4,500 for an automobile worth, say, $9,000....LOL

jackalope said:

Did it push sales forward, and stave off a 'falling off the cliff' scenario? Did it encourage higher mileage cars to be purchased? Did it get lower mileage cars off the road?

Some questions I have.





I was reading about this earlier. It's made me begin to question if extending the credit is a good idea.

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Of course it wasn't a good idea. It was nothing more than circus, without the bread.

dirtpoorchris said:

I remember seeing videos of dealers purposely burning their engines out. Because the car was worth more quickly junked than selling for cheap to someone who could eventually use it.

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One requirement of the stupid program was that cars traded in be destroyed.

Ikari said:

It's similar for that housing thing where people were offered what like 8K or something for new home buyers. Most of those people were going to buy houses anyway. The incremental increase (i.e. renters turning owners whom wouldn't have) was rather low. All this stuff really does is make a government program which can be abused.

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The housing thing was even worse. Because you had to first buy the home to qualify, the only people who really benefited were those that could have bought a home without the credit. And the program was so easy to abuse. The IRS form required an address and a date of purchase, no other proof. So of course there was a lot of abuse - $8,000 for saying you bought a home is a deal for a lot of people. And they want to extend it, and add on a credit for those who already own a home but want to move.

What's the point anyway. People live in homes. If I rent or if I own, I'm occupying a home. Get all the renters to buy homes and they'll buy homes, while the previous owners of rental homes sell them because they're no longer profitable.

And they want to extend it in the bill with an unemployment extension title. I guess they at least realize people don't support the homebuyer credit so much that they can actually call it a homebuyer credit bill.

Joe1991 said:

BS "report".

690,000 vehicles were sold under the program, so:

3 billion divided by 690,000 = $4,347 per car.

The rest is pure conjecture. They have no way of knowing how many people would have bought a vehicle "anyway".

Cars were flying off the lots, and I'll bet everyone here knows someone who bought a car because ofthis deal.

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Well I'm sure that edmunds.com knows more about how to crunch those numbers than you or I do. Though I admit that it seems kind of flaky to compare unknown variables I still trust Edmunds to know more about that than I do.

There's more to running any government program than the apparent cost - so I think it's safe to presume that it was definitely higher than $4,500+ per vehicles considering government-paid man hours to do the extra work, cost for processing papers and other information, cost for starting and maintainin a website and so on, so forth.

Joe1991 said:

BS "report".

690,000 vehicles were sold under the program, so:

3 billion divided by 690,000 = $4,347 per car.

The rest is pure conjecture. They have no way of knowing how many people would have bought a vehicle "anyway".

Cars were flying off the lots, and I'll bet everyone here knows someone who bought a car because ofthis deal.

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I don't know anyone who bought a care because of the program. But, that doesn't matter.

Yeah, this program did get a lot of people to buy cars. However, why is that important enough to spend public tax dollars on it?

Seriously, I've had enough of the government bailouts and use of tax payer money to help private enterprise.