[Christ]

Not to be the argumentative one, Rick:

What about the smaller businesses that lost business due to those new car sales? In many cases, those older cars would have just been maintained, many times by a local (read: small) shop, but since those cars (many of which were not actually "clunkers" by standard definition, I might add) are now gone, those businesses have to rely on that many hundred thousand less vehicles for their income. Sure, it helped the dealers (many of whom purportedly took advantage of the program in their own interest, thus screwing several people attempting to take advantage of the program for their own benefit.) and the auto makers (marginally, of course), but from a real world POV, it didn't really help anything... it was like spending money to throw things away.