Cash for KlunkersFollow

It's a great program that I think could have been better. I'm going to go ahead and quote Gbaji since he actually made a couple good points.



My current car is eleven years old, has 131k miles, has some rust issues, the engine is on it's way out, and I get about 17 or so MPG. My car is the epitome of a clunker but because they go off of their estimate of the MPG instead of the actual MPG I don't qualify for the program. It seems to me that they could have come up with much better criteria than just an estimate of the mileage. Oh well, I'm still buying a car, I just won't get a discount like the person turning in their shiny near new 9 MPG pickup.

Edited, Aug 17th 2009 2:38am by Turin

I think one of the benefits not being discussed is that with better fuel economy, we become fractionally less dependent on the global oil market. Sure this isn't much by itself, but I do see it as a step towards one of Obama's long term goals of lowering foreign oil usage.

That would be the fault of the lenders. Hell, you don't even have the "The gummint MADE them lend the money!" arguments you have with the mortgage fiasco since nothing about the C4C program affects lending.

I think it's a stupid idea for 2 reasons: First, the nation has better things to do with it's money than buy it's citizens new cars (fixing the economy comes to mind); second, experts agree it's more economical to keep an old car running than to junk it and buy a new one. I haven't really seen obama try to make any long-term changes to the economy, all he's done is use our dwindling resources to try to make our lives just a little bit better. When he gets around to actually doing something about our economy instead of suggesting ********* ideas like this, i'll take him a little more seriously.

I work in the auto industry, and this Cash for Clunkers has certainly stimulated us. We have more work now than we are prepared for. GM, Ford, and even Chrysler has upped orders a ton. Honda, Toyota, and Hyundai orders are up.

So this is bringing about economic "fixes". Will it be permanent? Who knows. It may stop as soon as the program ends. Or maybe the sudden boom will be a kick start, and things will stay moving after?

But I can say this has brought us out of a slump and made us start to make a profit again, which is leading to more growth outside the auto industry for our company. That will ensure that regardless of what the Auto Industry does, our company will have received enough of a kick start from this program to continue to thrive.