A billion dollars gets soaked up like water into a sponge, in four days, and then Congress appropriates still more billions of bucks to get people to buy new cars by paying them more than their junkers are worth? Fantastic. And I do mean that in its true sense.
How many more billions of dollars are going to run down the Cash for Clunkers drain?
Wouldn’t it have made more sense to use that money to build a decent public transportation system for one major city or one geographic region that doesn’t have one? Since almost no major US cities have anything that resembles viable public transport, surely it wouldn’t have been difficult to find a place to build one.
And if we want to get the gas-guzzling, emissions-belching junk off the road, there’s a simple way to do it: don’t let people register them. It wouldn’t take umpty-umpteen billion dollars to pass a law saying a car that’s X number of years old and that gets less than Y miles per gallon cannot be driven on the public roads. And no exceptions for “historic” vehicles. Then fine the bejayzus out of people who leave them rusting on private property or beside public thoroughfares. This would force owners to turn them in for salvage. Then those who can’t afford to buy a new junker could ride the lightrail, high-speed trains, and buses our taxpayer billions would be freed up to build.
It’d put a lot more people to work than a batallion of car salesmen, too.