Clunkers for Cash: Subsidy for the Rich

I'd like to take a moment and complain heartily about the Clunkers for Cash program. In case you haven't heard, it allows you to get something like up to $4,500 from the government if your old car is sufficiently fuel-inefficient and it is replaced with a tidy little econobox... brand new, of course. And that is where my problem lies.

Just to clarify my wider stance, I disagree with the program itself on the simple basis that I do not believe the government should be using my taxpayer dollars to pay people for the cars that they drive. This is not a matter of national defense or the simple running of the government. It is not a matter of ensuring the uncoerced determination of value that runs a good free market economy. However, even were I to agree with the program and with the government's administering of it, I can still find a problem with what it does and for whom.

If you are going to buy a new car, you need one of two things: a bank account containing the money for a new car, or enough room in your budget for a monthly payment. My family has neither. I continue to wonder how we would be classified economically. My husband works a middle-class job, technically. Since I do not work full-time (I purposely took a job with lower earning power than I actually have, because it is family-friendly), our household income is less than half of what you might expect from a family with college-educated parents. Anyways, the relevancy to this topic is that we have neither sufficient savings to buy a new car nor the room in our monthly budget to make payments on a new car.

Therefore, Cars for Clunkers automatically does absolutely nothing for us.

Recently, my husband's car permanently died. It was a '90 Cutlass Ciera that we bought six years ago for $500, and though it technically still runs, its problems include brake line failure, a rusty gas tank beginning to leak, a transmission that downshifts as if it's going to drop out of the vehicle, and a myriad of mysterious oil leaks. It garnered, on average, 15-20mpg.

We took all of our savings and purchased an '01 Honda Civic. Despite having higher mileage than the car we are replacing, it looks as if it has at least five more years of life in it. My husband reports fuel economy in the neighborhood of 50mpg, but that is only an estimate, since he has not had to fill the gas tank yet.

My car is an '89 Chevy Cavalier station wagon. As of right now, it has no mechanical problems, just a few cosmetic 'quirks'. The body is finally rusting, and I hope it can hold together until we can afford its replacement. If it doesn't keep running for another three or four years at least, we may be stuck with one car, which is tougher than it sounds when you live at least 3 miles away from any non-residential building.

If the Honda Civic was a new vehicle, we would surely qualify for Cash for Clunkers. Unfortunately, we don't have the money to buy a new vehicle. Even the least expensive new vehicle, after the government rebate, would be at least twice what we paid for the Honda. If the program worked for used cars, we could have just about paid for the Honda with the rebate and still had our little nest egg to use when my car gives up its ghost.

But I've learned a long time ago that the government, when run by Liberals, doesn't care about people like us.

The kicker is this: Since we are not too poor to pay taxes, the government will be taking money that we could have used to save for our car fund and using it to pay people who earn more than we do so that they can buy their brand-new cars for less.

Liberals often wonder how anybody below the upper-middle-class could possibly disagree with their social programs. I'm here to explain that this is just one of many examples that formed my anti-socialist bent.

If the government trying to help troubled Americans save the economy results in lower-class Americans paying for upper-class Americans to drive brand new cars, what will the government trying to help troubled Americans afford health care do to us?