Unpopular opinion: That whole 'cash for clunkers' program was actually bad policy

I was arguing with my neighbor about this last Tuesday. He said it saved the auto industry and got old polluters off the road. I told him it just crushed thousands of perfectly good used cars that could have been sold to low income families. My buddy in Detroit had a 1995 Civic with 180K miles that ran fine. Dealer crushed it. Seems wasteful to me. Has anyone else run into this program backfiring in real life?

2 comments

2 Comments

spencer_moore3925d ago

Right, because vaporizing a perfectly good 1995 Civic that still had life left in it really helped the environment. I heard the government paid people to basically send their cars to the crusher, and my uncle's old F-150 got turned into a paperweight even though it was still reliable. It just felt like a giant middle finger to anyone who couldn't afford a brand new car. Guess we all just had to go buy a new Hyundai to save the planet, huh? Real efficient way to boost new car sales, I'll give them that.

henry_palmer2425d ago

Oh man, don't even get me started on that Cash for Clunkers mess. I had a 1998 Ford Ranger that ran like a top, not a single check engine light, and I could have driven that thing for another ten years easy. But they were offering like four thousand bucks for it, which sounded like a lot at the time until I realized I had to buy some overpriced new car just to get the deal. So my perfectly good truck gets crushed and I'm stuck with a car payment all because some bureaucrat decided my old truck was a "polluter." It was basically a tax on people who couldn't afford a new car in the first place, dressed up like a green initiative.