-By Warner Todd Huston
Obama’s “Cash for Clunkers” program was his idea to save American auto buyers money and help “green” the roads at the same time. But the program was a monumental failure. It was so bad it has now been determined that it didn’t save anyone anything. In fact, it cost America 6 billion in wasted dollars!
Along with the obvious problems with the program that showed up right at the beginning, now that the long term effects are starting to be quantified, it has become clear that the program forced auto buyer to spend less on their autos tan they would have costing the auto industry some $3 billion in sales.
A new study written by Mark Hoekstra, Steven L. Puller and Jeremy West and published by the National Bureau of Economic Research has found that the program caused buyers to spend about $4,600 less per purchase. Totaled that is about a $3 billion loss in revenue to the auto industry.
Then you add the other 3 billion Obama lavished onto the auto industry and we get $6 in federal waste.
Of course, this is all on top of the other negative effects this clunker of a program had on America.
For instance, as I noted in August of 2010, the program actually hurt those Americans with the least to spend on a used car causing used car prices to soar at least 16 percent in only a few months time.
It also didn’t spur people to buy cars even though they hadn’t planned to. In fact it only pushed plans forward a short time for those who already intended to buy another car. As a “stimulus” plan it failed.
Worse, the program hurt everyone who used it because the $4,500 the program doled out for each used car destroyed became declarable income and participants in the program had to pay income taxes on that “free” money!
Eventually, even one of Obama’s own appointees said that the program was a bad idea.
So, there you have it. Yet another Obama failure.
On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t a failure. Obama never cared if his program made economic sense. His goal was to destroy millions of perfectly good cars so that he could push his “greenist” ideas on the nation.
His goal is to destroy the auto industry, really, to drive people out of cars not into them. So, in that way he succeeded in more ways that we can imagine.
Obama’s promise that he’d “remake” the nation is really proceeding at a rollicking pace. His ultimate goal is to make of the USA a lesser place than he found it and he is succeeding beyond his wildest dreams.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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