Alright, you can call me a skeptic, or some sort of dog in the manger, but I have been getting really suspicious about the Cash for Clunkers program.  For several reasons - for one, we're spending enough already, and this is one of the few spending programs that goes to benefit the people that pay the government its revenue, i.e. taxes, with which they spend it on programs like C4C.  Most of the spending bills that have been aimed at fighting the recession have gone to benefit huge corporate entities, and not the consumer nor the workforce. Since we have disbursed the trillions of dollars we pumped into the bailout, there hasn't been a significant increasein jobs - in fact, companies are still laying people off en masse.  Just because it's a few hundred thousand less makes little difference to the people that have to suffer it.

Second, let's be honest here - the only people that are going to have access to the credit or the cash in order to purchase a new car from a dealership aren't the people that were troubled by the recession and therefore put off from purchasing a new car if they were planning to.  The credit market is so tight, the majority of people that are going to be able to participate in the Cash ofr Clunkers program are people that would have been able to afford it anyway - what this essentially means is that the bailouts, and similar measures, do nothing for the working poor or the lower middle class (i.e. the majority) and do everything to help out the people that really don't need it at all. I think by this point, it should be more or less self evident that the notion of "trickle down" does not in any way work.  

Furthermore, I think we've seen probably too much corporate welfare.  If a company is too large to fail, there's a reason for that - they have been given governmental favor that has increased their market share to the point that they are no longer competitive, and get institutional status simply on the basis of existence rather than on merit, which goes against free market principles.  Under a free market, there would be no such thing as too big to fail. I notice to the right of this article is a link to another one entitled "Should Obama go after the bloated brewers?" That's a stupid idea - breweries do not, in any way, get the kind of government favoritism that the finance industry does, and they have remained competitive for a reason - the big breweries (Bud, Coors, and Miller) have remained popular because people like the product, and micros are carving out a great niche for themselves.  (As they are superior.) They haven't gotten too big to fail - why? Because they depend on customers, which is a principle of free economics - something which Obama and his Wall Street entourage should look into.

If they really wanted to do something for car sales, instead of a payment, a tax break would have been a better idea.  Think about it - we already offer a one time $700 credit for purchasing a hybrid or electric, so perhaps a smaller discount of up to, say $500 per year that you drive a car that gets over...I don't know, 25 mpg and gets over a certain emission rating - that way, people who buy a car that doesn't qualify aren't out anything, but those that do get a bonus for doing so.  Cash for clunkers along with a lot of the other bailout schemes...doesn't seem to add up to anything good for the people directly, which something like a public works project, rebuilding NOLA's levees would have been - in the words of Shakespeare, "This cannot come to good."