Re: CLUNK!

Easy, what's amazing is that there are some usually reliable conservative commentators yielding grudging admiration of the huge crowds in dealerships that were induced by the Clunkers program. This shows that human activity of any kind has a powerful hold on the imagination.

But you could get a swirl of human activity by offering to give away $4,500.00 to every man, woman and child who walks 50 times clockwise around the Washington Monument wearing a flowered hat. And not just a swirl; I suspect you would get a torrent of human activity of Kansas twister proportion, but besides the increased sales of flowered hats, I doubt this would produce anything more than a potentially dangerous public nuisance.

The question is whether the activity is real or trivial. The purchase of the new cars under the Clunkers program is certainly real, producing actual economic benefits to all parties. But this benefit is offset by the fact that it is induced by $4,500.00 taken from some Americans and given to others, which works a decrease in overall economic activity, especially in those goods and services that might otherwise have been bought except for the Clunkers program.

But the worst part about the program is the positive damage done to the economy by the destruction of the clunkers. This would be the equivalent absurdity of requiring the Washington Monument walkers, upon receiving their bag of cash from the government, to burn the money rather than spend it.

There is nothing, nothing at all, good about the Cash for Clunkers stimulus program.