Due to it driving up the costs of used cars, one of the relatively few characters who benefited from Bruce Braley’s Clunker buy-up program.
George Will writes today in Human Events describing a study authored by Ted Gayer and Emily Parker for the left of center Brookings Institute about the effects of the Cash for Clunkers program inflicted on America at the beginning of Obama’s first term. The lead sponsor in the House was Iowa’s own Bruce Braley, now candidate for U.S. Senate. Its goal was to spur economic recovery by “incentivising” the taking of some used cars off the road if new cars were purchased. It was sold as a job creator. Unfortunately for tax payers the cost was about $1.4 million per job supposedly created. Will has much to say about the article, the program and its implications, excerpts follow. It can be read in its entirety here.
Barack Obama’s presidency has become a feast of failures whose proliferation protects their author from close scrutiny of any one of them. Now, however, we can revisit one of the first and see it as a harbinger of progressivism’s downward stumble to HealthCare.gov.
“Cash for Clunkers” was born with Obama’s administration as a component of his stimulus. Its fate is a window into both why the recovery has been extraordinarily weak and what happens when progressives’ clever plans collide with recalcitrant reality.
. . . Because the program was not means-tested, it had only a slight distributional effect of the sort progressives favor: Voucher recipients had lower incomes than others who bought new cars in 2009. Against this, however, must be weighed the fact that the mandated destruction of so many used vehicles probably caused prices for such vehicles to be higher than they otherwise would have been, meaning a redistribution of wealth adverse to low-income consumers.
The Brookings study also exposed that the claimed environmental benefits from the program of reducing the carbon exhausted by older vehicles actually far exceeded what liberals calculate as the social costs of that carbon. Bruce Braley’s Clunker program cost tax payers $1.4 million per job, drove up used car prices for all people especially relevant to low income people and damaged the environment in terms of using up funds more appropriately used. We have previously posted an article making the point about what an environmental boondoggle Braley’s Cash for Clunker program was. R Mall
