The Truth About Cash-for-Clunkers
The Obama administration has been raving about the success of “Cash for Clunkers” (officially named the Car Allowance Rebate System, or CARS), and this week Congress dutifully approved $2 billion more for the program. Why the popping of champagne corks? First, the demand for the program was so great that consumers burned through the $1 billion allotted for the rebates in a matter of days. Second, with the amount of flak the administration has taken for its mismanagement of the economy and the health care debate, any perceived victory is welcome. But this is simply not the victory that Obama wants us to believe it is.
Even in the handful of days that the program was active, CARS was plagued by administrative problems — just like any other government program. The government Web site that dealers were told to use to submit buyers’ rebate applications crashed repeatedly due to the high volume of requests. Dealers also had a difficult time registering for the program. Fine-print stipulations about the types of cars and light trucks that could be turned in and which ones could be bought led to customer confusion. Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA) said, “If this is how the government is going to handle billion-dollar programs affecting all Americans, I ask, whatever will we do if this administration takes control of our health care?”
Meanwhile, the positive impact on the automotive industry and the economy, and indirectly on energy consumption and the environment, is grossly overstated. The upsurge in new vehicle sales that CARS is expected to bring will likely to be short lived — all it did was condense several months of expected new vehicle sales and old vehicle trade-ins into a shorter period of time. No new wealth is being created; it’s just moving from one pocket to another. And destroying thousands of older, cheaper automobiles negatively affects the economy. Having trouble finding an inexpensive used vehicle for your newly driving son or daughter? Thank the CARS program.
Beyond all these issues, Fox News’ Glenn Beck reported that the federal government posted an ominous message at the Clunkers Web site stating that while logged into the Department of Transportation CARS system, users’ computers would be considered property of the federal government and therefore all materials on the computers could be scanned, recorded, monitored, inspected and disclosed to any element of the government, including law enforcement. After Beck’s program aired, the government quickly “clarified” that users who logged into the site had no explicit or implicit expectation of privacy, which sounds essentially like what Beck reported, just in better legalese.
This should be considered an outrage of epic proportions, but the response from watchdog groups has been muted. The ACLU, which challenged every move the Bush administration made during his eight years in office, had this to say: “[I]t is hard to believe that [the Obama administration] would do something like this.” Unfortunately it’s not hard to believe that the ACLU’s selective view of civil liberties would cause them to be asleep at the switch while Socialists run the White House.
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