Black Is White: Sibby Shows Cash for Clunkers Has No Negative Impact on Donations

Steve Sibson and I have picnicked together twice this summer. We played the bad kids in class at Saturday's Glenn Beck picnic, distracting ourselves with small asides on what we were hearing.

But our positive personal interaction does not change my opinion that Mr. Sibson has a bad tendency to hear what he wants rather than what is. His post this morning about Cash for Clunkers is a stunning example of Sibby's disconnect from logic and reality.

Sibby's headline: "What Cash for Clunkers Is Destroying." His tag line: "It is obvious that Cash for Clunkers are destroying donations like these."

He then copies and pastes this KSFY article about the Wheels to Work program in its entirety (Sibby! Learn to use blockquote!). I expect the KSFY article to perform the normal function of evidence and support Sibby's argument. Silly me.

Among other things, Cliff Chandler's report says...

• "While [Wheels to Work] has been operating in the Sioux Empire for 15 years, the only started to take off within the past month"... the same month Cash for Clunkers was in effect.
• "Suzanne 'Lynn' Cheesman said, 'We set a goal of ten cars. We know it's a big item to donate and we're blown away.' Tires, Tires, Tires offered to fix the donations up, making sure they're safe for the road. Since the first of the month, more than 30 cars have been dropped off."
• "'So we're going to have enough cars to cover enough people on our waiting list and to help people in the future,' said Karen Hattervig of Wheels to Work."

The KSFY report Sibby cites says not one word about Cash for Clunkers. It says not one word about Wheels for Work or any other auto donation program suffering. As a matter of fact, it says the exact opposite, that Wheels for Work is enjoying unprecedented success in Sioux Falls.

There's plenty of legitimate ground on which to argue the merits of Cash for Clunkers. But Sibby's post this morning is illogical and irresponsible. I like Steve, but he needs to take his head out of his bucket and listen to what the people he cites are actually saying.

Madison Car Dealer: Whole State Happy About Cash for Clunkers

Pat Prostrollo really loves Cash for Clunkers. He loves it so much he'll let his general sales manager John Draper go on statewide television to say Obama and those Democrats in Washington are doing a spectacular job for the whole darn state.

Well, Draper didn't say exactly that... but close enough!

At Prostrollo Auto Mall in Madison, there's little doubt how everyone feels about "Cash For Clunkers."

"We're happy, customers are happy, and I think the whole local and state economy is happy because it's bringing in more business and more tax dollars," said John Draper, Prostrollo's General Sales Manager

Draper believes the auto industry has been steadily improving over the year. Along with lower gas prices and financial bailouts, the "Cash For Clunkers" program has helped revive his business.

"It was slow," Draper admitted. "Part of it was people were concerned about the viability of GM and Chrysler because of the bankruptcy. But now that that's handled, a lot of customers have some faith now there's going to be a dealer in their town" [David Brown, "Clunkers Help Small-Town Dealerships," KELOLand.com, 2009.08.08].

Everyone's happy. Whole state economy is better off. Pesky GM and Chrysler bankruptcies are handled. Dang—sounds like a mighty vote of confidence in Washington to me!

-----------------
Minor media quibbles:

1. Hey, David Brown, who you callin' "small-town"? We're Madison, the 13th biggest city in the whole state of South Dakota! And did you see the size of the Prostrollo Auto Mall (not to mention that big white buffalo)?
   
2. Send the sports guy to do news, and what do you get? "'There's a lot of confidence for the community and the people working at the car dealership and directly, for other businesses that are depending on the automobile business," Draper said. Which puts Madison squarely in the driver's seat." Ugh! Sentence fragment... and the figure of speech doesn't even make sense tacked onto the end of this quote. Call the Saturday editor!
   

Cash for Clunkers Not Green Enough for Conservatives?

SDP's new traffic wunderfräulein, Miranda Flint, says Cash for Clunkers set off her enviro-spidey-sense. She just knew the program couldn't be as green as it seemed. And thank goodness, Fox News comes along to assure her she's right:

It takes energy to shred and recycle metals; plastic components often cannot be recycled and end up as landfill cover; and the engine fluids, refrigerants and other chemicals essential to operating products end up as hazardous wastes ["Does Cash for Clunkers Help the Environment? It's Debatable," Fox News, 2009.08.05].

When conservatives have to resort to arguing that a liberal policy successfully stimulates the economy but causes environmental harm and "does nothing to reduce America's dependence on oil," we liberals must be winning.

Ms. Flint should rest easy. (Demolition concerns in a moment.) First, not only has Cash for Clunkers provided much faster economic stimulus than expected, but it has also proved greener than expected:

Dealers estimated that they moved a quarter-million cars with the rebate money. The Transportation Department reported that of 120,000 rebate applications processed so far, the average gas mileage of cars being bought was 28.3 miles per gallon, for SUV’s 21.9 miles per gallon, and for trucks, 16.3 miles per gallon, all significantly higher than required to get a rebate.

“The statistics are much better than anybody dreamt they would be,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who, with Senator Susan M. Collins, Republican of Maine, was the author of an early version of a “cash for clunkers” bill that would have required bigger improvements. The actual mileage gain seen so far, she said was not due to the details of the law but “the good judgment of the American people” [Nick Bunkley and Derrick Henry, "As 'Clunker' Rebates Help Ford, Aid May Be Extended," New York Times, 2009.08.04]

But what about the messy, stinky, leaky scrapping process? Sure, it takes energy to tear apart a car, and the process can release all sorts of engine fluids and other chemicals. But that happens with or without Cash for Clunkers. Much as I hate to think about it, my 1993 Jeep Wrangler will someday go to the scrap heap. (It will probably just fall apart beneath me on the highway someday, spewing its parts and fluids all over the road, rather than letting anyone haul it away to the old clunkers' home.) The same environmental impact accrues whether we scrap these gas guzzlers now or five, ten, twenty years down the road. Scrapping them now incurs that salvage cost now and saves us 5–20 years of operating emissions.

I would also speculate that scrapping them now means more recycling. Suppose I did Cash-for-Clunkerize my Jeep today. Some salvage yard would have a whole heap of 1993 Jeep Wrangler parts to resell. And the market for 1993 Jeep Wrangler parts will only get smaller. The sooner my parts are available, the more chance the salvage yard will have to sell them and make some money rather than having Jeep bits rusting and polluting their pristine junkyards.

Cash for Clunkers is making the conservatives mad because it is working so spectacularly well on every front. It's boosting the economy. It's making long-term improvements in fuel efficiency. It's providing a simple and vivid counterargument to all that "gummint can't do nothin' right" talk that GOP games-players have to sell to hide the fact that they can't come up with policies that do work.

But I thank Ms. Flint for her concern about the environment. Now I wonder what she thinks about that big nasty foreign oil pipeline being dug through our fair state....

----------------------------
Update 14:40 CDT: Alas, Ms. Flint misrepresents my argument:

Mr. Heidelberger at The Madville Times responds to my post by arguing that even though destroying vehicles probably does harm the environment, it's alright because it boosts the economy. Cory is beginning to sound a lot like a Republican!

Well, Ms. Flint is correct that Republicans tend to embrace economic gains without due regard for environmental impacts. But what I said was that we incur the same impacts of junking these cars now as we would years down the road. Fifty years from now (big picture, Miranda), the landfills will be as junked up as if we hadn't done Cash for Clunkers. But by junking the clunkers now, we eliminate the environmental impact of their continued use. The gain over a non-Cash-for-Clunkers scenario may be small, but it is still a gain. More to the point, Ms. Flint has not proven net environmental harm greater than if Cash for Clunkers had not passed.

Green Stimulus That Works: Cash for Clunkers

Here's stimulus that Pat Prostrollo, Dave Billion, and us hippies can love: the Cash for Clunkers program is such a doorbusting success that it's burned up its one-billion-dollar budget in barely a week and has buyers and dealers clamoring for more:

The federal program provided rebates of $3,500 or $4,500 to consumers who traded in vehicles with combined city/highway mileage of 18 miles per gallon or less and bought more fuel-efficient new cars or trucks.

The program was designed to run until Nov. 1 or until 250,000 cars had been sold, whichever came first. Many analysts had expected the money to last at least until Labor Day.

..."I hope they will extend the program because it was such a win on so many levels -- for the consumers, for the environment, for all the car manufacturers," said John Sackrison, executive director of the Orange County Automobile Dealers Assn. "It got a lot of people to go car shopping who wouldn't have otherwise."

...Dealers and automakers said the plan clearly sparked a level of interest that had been missing in new-car showrooms, which have looked like ghost towns for much of the last year [Martin Zimmerman, Tiffany Hsu, and Jim Puzzanghera, "'Cash for Clunkers' Program Runs out of Gas," Los Angeles Times, 2009.07.31].

Now it's possible we might have just gotten lucky: car sales had been so slow for so long, there was nowhere for them to go but up. The incentive program may just have coincided with an upturn that would have happened anyway. And I still hesitate to cheer about government programs that encourage people to buy more stuff.

But if we need people to buy stuff to get us out of the recession, we can at least aim at getting people to buy something useful, like cars that get better gas mileage. It looks like Cash for Clunkers is one government stimulus program that's hitting on all cylinders.