By Ned Barnett
(c) 2009
Over the past decade, donated well-used but still functional automobiles have become a major source of funds for charities. However, the kinds of cars usually donated to those charities have now become the target of a mechanical pogrom - a brutal "Final Solution" for older automobiles. The government's "Cash for Clunkers" program has led to the sale of a lot of allegedly greener autos (though few bother to do the math - if they did, they'd realize that C4C has a bigger carbon footprint than the cars they crush) and the wanton destruction of tens of thousands of workable automobiles. Car dealers are thrilled - new-car owners feel great (and will until they have to start paying car notes again) - unions are doing fist-bumps as they log in more overtime and more benefits, and the ever-meddlign Greenies feel triumphant for being able to take other people's money to put greener cars on the market, distorting the market enough to make otherwise unwanted new cars economically desirable.
What we still laughingly call the "free market" has established that there is not a big US market for ultra-efficient sardine-cans-on-wheels. If the "green" cars were actually popular, the government wouldn't have to offer billions of dollars in tax-funded bribes to lure those who'd been happily driving completely functional but marginally less fuel-efficient cars and pack them into tin-foil death cars. We know the basic cost - a billion dollars last week and probably two to four billion dollars in the next two weeks - but there are other costs nobody is talking about.
First, destroying car engines and shredding perfectly good autos isn't cheap. The equipment to turn working SUVs into slag and scrap burns LOTS of carbon, even as it creates waste - shredded rubber, melted plastic, residual heavy metals from catalytic converters - not to mention the petroleum needed to ship this slag to China were it will be turned into more stuff America used to manufacture for itself - then yet more fossil fuel to ship those products back to us. So much for the marginal savings in carbon emissions.
But there are other, more human costs - and I'm not talking about the taxes you and I are paying so others can get new cars they don't really want at our expense. The human terms costs are paid by charities that have - for the past decade or so - raised increasingly significant percentages of their charitable funding from donated "clunkers" - tax write-offs for the donees and vital revenue sources for cash-strapped charities. Clearly, the government cared more about the supposed - but illusory - environmental benefits of the C4C program than it did for the increasingly essential charitable services.
A more subtle cost of this program. Among all the people who have depended on low-cost, working autos, none have had a greater need than battered women fleeing from abusive relationships who find themselves thrust back into the job market and desperate for a way to get to and from work. Without going into too-personal details, I'm painfully aware of women who have been trying to rebuild their lives, women who depended on reliable low-cost personal transportation. Not everyone lives in communities with functional public transportation - women in those areas have been dependent for decades on low-cost cars that are now being pulled off the market and shredded. With a quarter-million fewer reliable used cars suddenly pulled out of the marketplace, those women will find obtaining cars more costly and harder to do.
Though less in need, young families just starting out have that same need for affordable, low-cost and reliable transportation - and they'll have to make sacrifices or do without, all because liberal environmental elites and auto-union advocates who want more overtime and bigger benefits together pushed through a program that might have looked positive on the surface, but which had hidden - human - costs far in excess of any hypothetical benefits.
Washington - that master of the unintended consequences - has outdone itself in creating a program that is bad for all taxpayers (who are footing the bill) and especially less well-off Americans who are dependent - often critically dependent - on affordable transportation. However, they can rejoice in the knowledge that the Chinese will finally be getting enough low-cost scrap metal.
