Cash for Clunkers Program Shut Down After 4 Days

The Federal "Cash for Clunkers" program, scheduled to last until October, is already running short of money and will be shut down at midnight tonight. The program offered several thousand dollars to people who turned in older gas-guzzlers to buy a new car. About 1 billion dollars was allotted for the program.

The shut down will come even though the government will not pay for many transactions where buyers thought that they were getting the money. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told dealers Wednesday that a vast majority of transactions submitted were being rejected for incomplete or illegible paperwork. While demands for free money from the government was, as always, brisk, the whole thing is turning into a management and paperwork disaster.

The incompetence of statist big-government types is exceeding only by their arrogance. They can't even run a program like this without it turning into a ball of snags, yet they think they can take over (the rest of) the nation's health care system. They think they can accurately gage the demands for health care when the government is paying, but the money they thought would last about four months for this program instead lasted four days. At least they think this is what happened, but they really don't know if they are out of money because so many of the claims requesting money were "illegible or incomplete".

Reader of this space will know that I opposed all the bailouts, whose costs have swollen so that Congress has put We the People on the hook for an astounding 23 trillion dollars in potential liabilities. Still, if there was one bailout program for the common person, it was this one. The fact that they could only spare one billion for this program while almost all of the remaining 23 trillion dollars goes to shoring up their Wall Street and even international banking buddies speaks volumes as to their priorities. Send the lot of them home.