Commentary from Co-Anchor of ABC News’ 20/20
Congress: More Cash for Clunkers, Please!
Because sometimes, one billion isn’t enough.
The Obama Administration’s “Cash for Clunkers” program offers to buy used cars for $3,500 -$4,500 with taxpayer money. The government then destroys the “inefficient” used car. Not surprisingly, a lot of people want to sell their junk cars to the government. So many, in fact, that the $1 billion program has already run out of money.
Now it appears that Congress will ask not just for another billion, but another TWO billion. Look how generous Congress is with your money!
The idea is that by destroying used cars, people will buy new cars, which creates jobs. But this commits the “broken window fallacy”. That $3 billion taken from taxpayers to, essentially, destroy used cars now cannot be put towards college, or a new home, or new clothes, or anything else. Some used cars are no longer available for poor consumers to buy. If the “new car” market is helped by “Cash for Clunkers”, every other market is hurt because that $3 billion cannot be spent on anything else. …
http://blogs.abcnews.com/johnstossel/2009/07/congress-more-cash-for-clunkers-please.html
Granted, using American money to buy “clunkers” might escape the “logic” of some people especially since the “clunker program” is an attempt to impact climate change. The neocons did not fully accept the scientists warnings on climate change; but did react to it anyway.
The neocons had a much cheaper way to fight climate change until word got out on the “process” they used:
via NYTimes:
A Young Bush Appointee Resigns His Post at NASA
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: February 8, 2006
George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told public affairs workers to limit reporters’ access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word “theory” at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said.
Mr. Deutsch’s resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his résumé on file at the agency asserted.
Officials at NASA headquarters declined to discuss the reason for the resignation.
“Under NASA policy, it is inappropriate to discuss personnel matters,” said Dean Acosta, the deputy assistant administrator for public affairs and Mr. Deutsch’s boss.
The resignation came as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was preparing to review its policies for communicating science to the public. The review was ordered Friday by Michael D. Griffin, the NASA administrator, after a week in which many agency scientists and midlevel public affairs officials described to The New York Times instances in which they said political pressure was applied to limit or flavor discussions of topics uncomfortable to the Bush administration, particularly global warming.
http://firstpulseprojects.net/Strange-Weather-mt/2006/02/bush_appointee_resigns_post_at_1.html
The neocon “climate change approach”, in terms of money, would not have cost America much. There would be a salary plus other expenses.
Scientist speak of global warming but until people living along the Mississippi river actually sees one of those BIG chunks of Arctic ice come floating down the river – not to worry.
The money spent on “clunkers” would NEVER have been spent on clunkers by the latter-day neocons. That would be “wasting” good war money on something that was not a disaster yet. And the neocons would know how to handle climate disasters because of their “mastery” of the hurricane Katrina climate disaster.
While the neocons may not yet see a climate problem that warrants getting “clunkers” off the streets, take a look at the below:
University of Southern California
USC News
Smog May Cause Lifelong Lung Deficits
09/08/04
A long-term USC study following the pulmonary health of children in polluted L.A. areas signals likely health problems in adulthood.
By Alicia Di Rado
By age 18, the lungs of many children who grow up in smoggy areas are underdeveloped and will likely never recover, according to a study in this week’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
The research is part of the Children’s Health Study, the longest investigation ever into air pollution and kids’ health.
Between 1993 and 2001, study scientists from the Keck School of Medicine of USC tracked levels of major pollutants in 12 Southern California communities while following the pulmonary health of 1,759 children as they progressed from 4th grade to 12th grade.
The 12 communities included some of the most polluted areas in the greater Los Angeles basin, as well as several low-pollution sites outside the area.
Keck School researchers previously found that children who were exposed to more air pollution scored more poorly on respiratory tests. In this latest study, researchers analyzed the same children’s respiratory health at age 18, when lungs are almost completely mature.
“Teenagers in smoggy communities were nearly five times as likely to have clinically low lung function, compared to teens living in low-pollution communities,” said W. James Gauderman, associate professor of preventive medicine at the Keck School and lead author of the study.
People with clinically low lung function have less than 80 percent of the lung function expected for their age – a significant deficit that would raise concerns during a doctor’s exam.
“When we began the study 10 years ago, we had no idea we would find effects on the lung this serious,” said John Peters, Hastings Professor of Preventive Medicine in the Keck School, director of the Southern California Environmental Health Sciences Center and senior author of the study.
Study technicians traveled to participating schools every year and tested children’s lung function, a measure of how well their lungs work. As an example, someone with sub par lung function cannot exhale and blow up a balloon as quickly or as big as someone with good lung function.
Researchers correlated the students’ lung health measurements with levels of air pollutants monitored in the communities during the same time period.
They found greater deficits in lung development in teenagers who lived in communities with higher average levels of nitrogen dioxide, acid vapor, particulate matter with a diameter of less than 2.5 micrometers (about a tenth the diameter of a human hair) and elemental carbon.
“These are pollutants that all derive from vehicle emissions and the combustion of fossil fuels,” Gauderman said.Deficits in lung function have both short- and long-term effects.
While Mr. Stossel complains about taxpayer money spent on “clunkers”, bet he did not complain about this:
New report finds big problems in war spending
msnbc
World news / Conflict in iraq
Commission presents bleak assessment of how billions have been spent
AP Associated Press
June 7, 2009
WASHINGTON – This is one Christmas gift U.S. taxpayers don’t need. Construction of a $30 million dining facility at a U.S. base in Iraq is scheduled to be completed Dec. 25. But the decision to build it was based on bad planning and botched paperwork.
The project is too far along to stop, making the mess hall a future monument to the waste and inefficiency plaguing the war effort, according to an independent panel investigating contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In its first report to Congress, the Wartime Contracting Commission presents a bleak assessment of how tens of billions of dollars have been spent since 2001. The 111-page report, obtained by The Associated Press, documents poor management, weak oversight, and a failure to learn from past mistakes as recurring themes in wartime contracting. …
or this:
U.S. costs of Iraq, Afghan wars top $900 billion: report
REUTERS
By David Morgan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. military operations, including the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, have cost $904 billion since 2001 and could top $1.7 trillion by 2018, even with big cuts in overseas troop deployments, a report said on Monday.
A new study released by the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, or CSBA, said the Iraq conflict’s $687 billion price tag alone now exceeds the cost of every past U.S. war except for World War II, when expenditures are adjusted for inflation.
With another $184 billion in spending for Afghanistan included, the two conflicts surpass the cost of the Vietnam War by about 50 percent, the report said. …
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE4BE6LN20081215
And going from bad to worse, this:
BBC uncovers lost Iraq billions
By Jane Corbin
BBC News
A BBC investigation estimates that around $23bn (£11.75bn) may have been lost, stolen or just not properly accounted for in Iraq.
The BBC’s Panorama programme has used US and Iraqi government sources to research how much some private contractors have profited from the conflict and rebuilding. …
It is highly likely that the new Obama administration will have an accounting of how America’s tax money is spent. NOBODY DON’T KNOW HOW THE LATTER-DAY NEOCONS spent America’s money on wars. And when the post 2006 Congress attempted to do what the founding fathers intended that it do – the neocons told Congress not to micro-manage the war. And at that time the MACRO-MANAGING was a mess.
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