Prosperity: Cash For Clunksers Only Cost Ya $24,000 Per Vehicle

Because many of those vehicles would have been sold anyway. The true cost is the cost for each vehicle that was sold that otherwise wouldn't have been.

$24,000 bucks per car.

A total of 690,000 new vehicles were sold under the Cash for Clunkers program last summer, but only 125,000 of those were vehicles that would not have been sold anyway, according to an analysis released Wednesday by the automotive Web site Edmunds.com.

Still, auto sales contributed heavily to the economy's expansion in the third quarter, adding 1.7 percentage points to the nation's gross domestic product growth.

...

But the overwhelming majority of sales would have taken place anyway at some time in the last half of 2009, according to Edmunds.com. That means the government ended up spending about $24,000 each for those 125,000 additional vehicle sales.

And now the program ends, and not only is there no crazy cash giveaway anymore to continue these sales, but in fact some number of cars were merely bought earlier than they would have been.

Which means they won't be getting bought in subsequent quarters.

Oh, and, by the way, GMAC, GM's credit arm, only wants another paltry $6.5 billion bailout to keep going.

Which they'll get, of course.

posted by Ace at 02:23 PM

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