I'm still against the premise of this program. This was a redistribution of wealth to failing industry and to people who owned poorer cars. A couple B's in the larger scheme of things may not seem like a lot, but the underlying ideology is quite dangerous, and I'm hearing rumours that this may be expanding to appliances that are not energy efficient.<p>There's a much simpler way to accomplish the same effect: tax energy. You will have an economic incentive to get more efficient appliances, cars, etc while this costs the federal government very little. To combat the regressiveness of this proposal, the feds could offset this with reducing payroll taxes.<p>The obvious downside of this is that it doesn't have the "sexiness" of the rebate (it's a behavioral finance thing) and we wouldn't see the returns immediately.
Cash for Clunkers reminds me of the Broken Window Fallacy<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window</a>
Although I'm generally progressive and agree with the environmental goals of this program, I worry that it's essentially encouraging people to take on new debt through car loans. Aren't we as a society already highly overleveraged?
Interesting that 8/10 new cars that were purchased where foreign. I wonder what percentage of that rebate trickles into American pockets and which goes overseas.
>the Ford Explorer topped the list of most traded-in clunkers<p>We helped with that. I had a 2002 Explorer with 145K miles that we traded in for a Honda Odyssey. Since we went from the SUV class to the car class, the mpg rating difference only had to be five mpg to qualify for the $4500 subsidy.<p>As a libertarian, I oppose this program, but it certainly was an appealing proposition considering that I would have likely gotten $3K max if I sold the Explorer outright. What is sad is that, while there were a bunch of things I didn't bother to get fixed (air conditioning, etc.), the vehicle was still quite drivable and probably would have lasted another 100K miles with three or four thousand in maintenance. A huge percentage of the world's population can only dream of one day owning a car that we as Americans are sending to the scrap heap.
The statstics I'd really be intersted in (and these would be impossible to measure precisely, buT well-thought-out estimates woul be helpful.) would be the total estimated energy usage of new vehicles purchased under the program, compared to the energy usage of the clunkers traded in, and with that net result compared to the energy used in manufacturing all those new cars.
WoW not one of the top 10 sold cars is a GM model - though that's not surprising. Though you'd think since all their troubles which were noted in Nov 08 they'd try to get a car out in the market that would be more attractive then any Honda, Toyota and Ford.<p>Why did we bail them out? For the 40K Volt that may provide 230mpg?
here's the DOT press release with more stats:
<a href="http://www.dot.gov/affairs/2009/dot13309.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.dot.gov/affairs/2009/dot13309.htm</a>