If the US automakers were making aesthetically-pleasing cars, we wouldn’t have had to bail them out or give them $3B in per-car subsidies.

Instead, we’ve merely ensured the continuation of the people who brought us the Aztek, the Pacer, the Gremlin, the Citation, the Skylark . . .

That’s very childish. If you buy 3 clunker cars and decide to trade them, you have BUY 3 new cars. Assuming you pay $15k/car, you’ll end up spending $45k and get ~$13k for the clunkers. However, what are you going to do with the 3 new cars? Sell them? Their value has been slashed by 2/3 immediately so you actually end up losing $10k at the end. That scheme doesn’t work.

It is, in fact, self-evident that jon has never run his own business, else he would recognize the challenge of having forked over several hundreds of thousands of dollars (per dealer) in expectation of government compensation, only to (futilely) await for a “check in the mail.”

Alas, real honest-to-God businesses -unlike the government- have to operate on cash outflow with respect to revenue gained. Come to think of it, this literally is a “the check is in the mail” situation, but who’s going to sue the Feds!?

I’ll also take a moment to point out the irony that many late-model cars & trucks qualified for the program, while my 1992 Acura Integra does not. 129k miles on it, rust on the right-rear quarter panel, shabby interior, yet it still averages 30-31mpg overall. And I don’t freaking qualify!!

That’s just Not Fair.

The car dealers will be getting years of monthly checks from those who bought new cars under the program. The government check is just one part of their gain. And for the size of them, they’ll be patient for at least a little while.

Give the old vehicles 10 more years worth of life.
Give the new ones 15 years.

Re-calculate with the $850 million from Mr. Bingley

Being an empathetic sort, however, and irrationally attached to the inanimate objects entrusted to my care (like my ’87 Pathfinder, ’92 525i…you get the picture) leaves me uniquely positioned to pontificate on the emotional toll of watching much loved, perfectly good, older vehicles executed before their time:

Watch out, Granny. Your mileage ain’t what it used to be either…

Murderous bastards.

I’m sure that makes doctors really excited about the govt running health care.

I have no idea what a ‘peck’ is, though.

A barrel of oil is 42 gallons, true, but that’s gallons of crude, not gasoline. From what 30 seconds of googling informed me is that from a 42 gallon barrel of oil one gets the following products after refining:
10.31 gals of diesel
1.38 gals of heavy distillates (like home heating oil)
4.07 gals jet fuel (not to be confused with strong coffee)
7.01 gals of various products (lubricants, etc)
1.68 gals heavy fuel oil
1.72 gals liquefied petroleum gases (LPG)
18.56 gals of gasoline

(Now if you do math like I do math, you’ll notice that this adds up to nearly 45 gallons; evidently the refining processes change the density (and increase the volume) of some of these products)

So these 224 million gallons of gas in fact are the equivalent of a little over 12 million barrels of oil, not 5, which means we “may” save a whopping $840 million dollars by spending $3 billion. Again, it still is insane but if we’re going to be racist by opposing these policies we might as well do it with somewhat more accurate numbers.

224 million divided by 5 million = 44 gallons of gas per barrel of oil. Isn’t a barrel 55 gallons? It’s not a 100% conversion, its 80%. Is 80% accurate? I don’t know.

Also, no one has taken into account the overhead. We had to pay a small army of bureaucrats for a few weeks to check the dots on the i’s and the crosses on the t’s, authorize the checks, print the checks, mail the checks, answer questions about the checks….

And don’t forget the cost of money. That $3B was borrowed at 3 or 4% and won’t be paid back any time soon.

Yes, the clunkers are off the road and therefore the gas savings will occur for a number of years. (2 years: the remaining life of the clunker? 10 years: the life of the clunker’s replacement? I think 2 is more accurate, but take the average: 6 years.)

So we paid $3B today plus overhead, plus interest for the foreseeable future on both, for a reduction is gas usage of 224M gallons of gas/year for the next six years. Only the government and that guy selling eggs for in Catch 22 could claim that is a profit making proposition.

SteveB’s right about the time aspect; the other thing that hasn’t been mentioned is that once Obama’s craven attitude towards Iran pushes Israel into a strike, oil will be well above $70….

That’s a solid win-win business plan — for everybody except the taxpayer.

From an environmental standpoint, you up the average fuel efficiency of the American auto fleet, but at the cost of taking cars off the road before the natural end of their lives, which increases the average number of cars each Amercian drives in their lifetime, with all of the environmental impact of the additional auto manfacturing and disposal–a net loss to the environment, I’d bet.

Do the roads look prettier? This program may have been called “Cash for Clunkers”, but the visual or mechanical quality of the car is irrelevant to eligibility in the program. It is really “Cash for Guzzlers” that supporters misnamed for their own narrative reasons. Many old cars are prettier than many new ones. Let’s call it a wash.

Air pollution? It’s decreased a bit, but how to you put a dollar figure on that considering that we have don’t have any active programs to scrub the air? Not yet, anyway.

So you got saved gas. Well, it didn’t save me any gas because my clunker, like most real clunkers, is a rice burner and not eligible for the program because the milage is too good. But I am in the market for a “new” (read “newer but still used”) car, which I will likely pay more for because of the market distortions caused by cash for clunkers. A definite loss for me.

So who gained in any meaningful way? The civil service? Well, yeah. Anyone else?