Things went crazy in 2009 with Cash for Clunkers. They went through the allotted billion dollars in six days and $2 billion more in the next twenty-four days.
Quote:
|
A 2009 paper in The Economists' Voice concluded that for each vehicle trade, the program had a net cost of approximately $2,000, with total costs outweighing all benefits by $1.4 billion.
|
A 2012 study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics found that care sales were so slow for the ten months after the program ended that it balanced out and there was "no evidence of an effect on employment, house prices, or household default rates in cities with higher exposure to the program."
People received $3,500 - $4,500 for their trade-ins. That would suggest around 750,000 running cars were scrapped and their engines were destroyed. Wikipedia mentions 680,000 "transactions."
One article concluded that 45% of people who participated would have bought a new car anyway.
"A 2017 study in the American Economic Journal found that the program, intended to increase consumer spending, reduced total new vehicle spending by $5 billion."
Quote:
|
In October 2011, former Obama administration economic advisor Austan Goolsbee stated that, "the administration misjudged how quickly the country could recover from the economic damage of the 2008 economic collapse" and now knowing that it has "proved a longer, tougher ride than we thought at the time", he would not have created this short-run program to stimulate the economy
|
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_Al..._Rebate_System
Excuse me if you guys knew all about that, I was shipping out to Germany during that time, and just knew that demand exceeded supply when I came home in 2012.
Imagine how many fewer stories I would have shared had I bought a 1999 Accord instead of my Forester. I would not have had the drama with my ex because I would be happy with the Honda. I would not have all of the repairs, particularly the head gasket.