With ‘Cash for Clunkers’ Costing Taxpayers $24K Per Vehicle, How Much Will ObamaCare Cost Us?

Bob McCarty Writes ^ | 10-29-09 | Bob McCarty

[BobMcCartyWrites]

Visit the federal government web site for the recently-concluded “Cash for Clunkers” program and you’ll find the program described as “enormously successful”. Contrary to that claim, however, Edmunds.com research revealed yesterday that the program, which enabled a car buyer to pay as much as $4,500 less for a new vehicle, actually cost taxpayers $24,000 per vehicle sold.

[BobMcCartyWrites]

Visit the federal government web site for the recently-concluded “Cash for Clunkers” program and you’ll find the program described as “enormously successful”. Contrary to that claim, however, Edmunds.com research revealed yesterday that the program, which enabled a car buyer to pay as much as $4,500 less for a new vehicle, actually cost taxpayers $24,000 per vehicle sold.

In the Department of Transportation’s July 27 news release introducing the program, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood was quoted as saying, “This is good news for our economy, the environment and consumers’ pocketbooks.”

Makes you wonder what kind of similar “good news” will surface if government-run health care (a.k.a., “ObamaCare”) becomes a reality.

[jessduntno]

And that doesn’t include the non-existent vehicles sold or the ones that never got destroyed and were resold or the depression in the market from the fire sale or the increase in prices of lower end vehicles because of the stock depletion...shall I go on? This is sick...

[bray]

That is our so called 3.5% growth in GDP. Looks like Enron is back cooking our books.

Pray for America’s Freedom

[WOBBLY BOB]

And, if IIRC,Tommy Friedman used to be an analyst for Enron.

[AngelesCrestHighway]

Costing us $24,000 a pop for a clunker just think how much Obamacare will cost...Lets just say you can forget about annual vacations, that boat, the big screen, your sons/daughters college education, a bigger house......ect.

[Peter Horry]

Post 2

I Have also heard accounts of people trading clunkers for qualifying fuel efficient vehicles only to trade them for SUVs and large pickups..... wonder how prevalent that was?

[DannyTN]

This is not really a fair analysis.

• Premise 1. 4/5's of the vehicles would have been sold anyway. There is no way to verify this. It's someone's assumptions. Maybe they would have and maybe they wouldn't have.
• Premise 2. They would have sold by the end of the year. That's an arbitrary time frame, that doesn't match the time frame of the program. Maybe they would have sold in the next year or the next three years. Is there some cannibalization from the future, undoubtedly, but you can't quantify it.
• Premise 3. The only goal was to sell new cars. I suspect there were also goals of getting inefficient cars off the highway and reducing polution.

What I would like to see is how much it really cost the taxpayers per rebate including administrative costs.

[OldEagle]

WHO got the money???