Help new-car buyers, make all happy (April 25)
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
Rep. Betty Sutton (D-Ohio) has come up with a good way to save the earth — at least as good a way as anybody else has come up with, including the green gangs that want to cap and tax carbon emissions.
Sutton has decided to back “cash for clunkers” legislation, which would pay people from $1,500 to $5,500 if they trade in their old cars for new ones.
Sutton had been against the legislation unless it restricted the payments to those buying made-in-America cars. But as it turns out, hardly any car is made altogether in America any more — except, oddly enough, for a model of Honda built in Ohio.
Other backers of the legislation are from states where auto factories ar located, and you can’t blame them for getting behind the effort. They want to help more new cars find their ways into the hands of consumers, keep the car factories humming and the taxes rolling in.
There’s a good argument that subsidizing purchases of new cars might be more effective in saving the auto companies than just handing money to the corporations that own them.
But the side benefit — maybe one as worthwhile as helping the car firms — would be that any new car would be less of a polluter than just about any old car. Most air-pollution-control people will tell you that getting clunkers off the road would be the quickest and most effective way of cleaning up the air. Also, most new cars tend to be more efficient, model for model, than older ones, and driving them would cut back on carbon dioxide emissions, all other things being equal.
Apparently, the clunkers would just be recycled and turned into paper clips.
So, if Uncle Sam is going to throw money into the car business, it wouldn’t hurt to toss some of it to car buyers, and make everybody happy.
