Cash Cow for Clunkers

I posted a little while ago about the Cash for Clunkers program the government was implementing to achieve two goals.  The first was to give the new car business a kick in the rear that it severely needs, second was to get older, less fuel efficient vehicles off the road and replace them with new vehicles that get significantly better mileage.  When the bill was introduced there was a lot of skepticism about it.  Negative pundits said it would not be an effective way to stimulate consumers to buy a car.  Wow were they wrong.

The program was scheduled to run until November or until the billion dollars allocated ran out, whichever came first.  The program only started 3 weeks ago.  I read today that the billion bucks is ALREADY gone. Some 250,000 people already took advantage of the incentive and traded in their “clunker” for more than they would have gotten on a traditional trade in. Holy shit.  Of course new car dealers now LOVE the program and are pushing for the government to put additional funding into the program since it has been such a runaway success.  Yea it’s just another hand out/ stimulus but this time it’s one people seem to like.

Hell I was rolling around the idea of trading in the party van just to get about double what I would hope to get on a private sale, it’s a great deal.  I would be surprised if they didn’t find additional money to pump into the program.