Cash for Clunkers

According to this report from the car folks at Edmunds, we (well, that is, the half of us who actually pay taxes) shelled out about $24,000 for every vehicle sold under the three-billion-dollar Cash for Clunkers program. That's only a little less than the average transaction price for a new car in August.

What does that say about government-managed car sales? Up next - government-managed health care!

UPDATE: The Empire Strikes Back.

ANOTHER UPDATE: BusinessInsider.com chimes in with this chart (shown below) showing quarter-to-quarter changes in auto sales. Cash for Clunkers produces an enormous spike in Q3 sales relative to Q2; they speculate that C4C just stole sales from the future and predict a dramatic drop next quarter.



Note to the BusinessInsider chartmeisters; Southern Man is available on a contract basis to show you how to create graphs with complete titles.

AND ANOTHER UPDATE: As was widely predicted, C4C took lots of inexpensive used cars off the market, and now it's difficult to find an inexpensive used car - which means that C4C, as many well-intended but ill-concieved government programs do, hurt the poor more than it helped.

AND YET ANOTHER: Remember how C4C was supposed to help us out by improving the country's overall gas mileage? According to this report, the most frequent transaction in the program was one Ford F-150 for another, with a marginal increase in mileage.