Well the government has found themselves out of money again on one of their widely exciting subsidising programs. This one is the CARS program that has put allot of consumer is the motion to trade in their old clunker and a new, more fuel efficient car. Well this went into action last Friday and was heavily publicized by the dealers and the auto companies. After 22,782 vehicles sold and $96 million of tax payer money spent, were do we go from here? Well only time will tell, but another question I have is when to we know something works? If we were to just be giving cars away that were payed for by tax dollars, till we ran out of money would that be considered a success if we were able to give away 20,000 cars? I am sure we could look at it that way.
Is it working? Or could there be a more useful way of spending all of our money? Was the federal bailout not enough for the car companies?
ReplyDeleteThe idea of giving cash to those who are trading in old cars to buy a new one might sounds like a good idea. But what is teh purpose of this stimulus plan? It may be to help the auto industry. The government already has given bilions in bail-out money to auto companies for them to stay in business. I think this is another way for the government to give them more money without doing it directly. They are trying to boost their sales. It is a wise decision considering the government now basically owns a large amount of stock in these companies. But how much is it going to really help? They just passed another bill allowing them to give more money to this plan. I don't think this is helping very much, just like the multi-billion dollar stimulus bill didn't help much. Was this cash for clunkers bill for environmental reasons? Well in order to qualify your old car must meet certain requirements of having poor gas mileage. And you must buy a new car with high gas mileage. How effective is this for the environment? The new cars purcahsed don't have a gas mileage that much higher than the clunkers. Also, the clunkers must be junked. According to an MSNBC article this bill is causing more relatively newer cars to be junked. This is posing problems for junk yards in getting rid of these cars. This means more waste and garbage which has a negative environmental impact. I think that this is another fluffly way for the government to make people feel like they care and are trying to help the economy. There are much more effective ways of boosting the economy, and helping the environment than to give away money for people to buy new cars. At least if the economy goes way south, more people will be driving nice cars.