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Honk if my cash paid for your clunker

August 7, 2009 by Keith Lockitch

The senate voted yesterday to extend the “Cash for Clunkers” program–a piece of Obama’s economic stimulus agenda in which the government doles out up to $4,500 for people to trade in older vehicles (the engines of which are then destroyed) for new cars that meet a government fuel efficiency standard.

Calling this “crackpot economics,” the Wall Street Journal points out that “the subsidy won’t add to net national wealth, since it merely transfers money to one taxpayer’s pocket from someone else’s, and merely pays that taxpayer to destroy a perfectly serviceable asset in return for something he might have bought anyway.”

Isn’t taking money from some people, giving it to others, and pretending that this creates wealth the essence of what Bernie Madoff was doing? The fact that Congress is doing it openly, with the sanction of law and under the guidance of Ivy League economists, doesn’t make it any less unjust.

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