The Government's expensive, inefficient and very popular Cash for Clunkers program will end August 24. It was wildly successful, mostly because it threw $3500 or $4500 at customers who owned an old car and could afford a new one -- unless they wanted a Cadillac or Lincoln or other American luxury car.


By the time the dealers get paid, probably in a month or more, the results will show that the program, at a taxpayer-borne cost of $3 Billion, sold about 750,000 new cars, with Fords and Toyotas selling the most. Chevrolet ranked down below several other foreign brands, though most of those cars were actually built in the US.

The program has been grossly inefficient -- and not only because it takes weeks or months to pay the dealers, who put their own money in customers' hands. It also overpaid by a factor of 3 or 4 for every car it turned over to the crusher. And it will be inefficient because there seem to be no Government plan to measure its results. How did it do in terms of pollution cleanup? Greenhouse gas cleanup? How did it or will it develop a customer profile of the participants who sold their vehicles into the program? Were they the ones who could benefit most? Were they average citizens? Were they slightly poorer than average Americans? Or, as seems likely, were they relatively more wealthy than the average citizen? Do Congress and the Administration have a plan to find out the answers to these and other questions? Not that they've told us.

Based on the history of Unocal's SCRAP program in 1991, the country could have sold at least as many new cars at no cost to the taxpayer. Or if the Government still wanted to fund it all, a properly structured program could have sold at least as many new cars while helping four times as many people move to cleaner vehicles. A properly constructed program would have cleaned many times the pollution tonnage that this one will, and would have the data to prove that case. And a properly constructed program would have a plan in place to collect the data on transactions, including the follow-up transactions, by program participants. So it could have been done cheaper, with better results, and gathered more information, while still helping Detroit sell new cars (which was its only purpose). Too bad the Government didn't go about the program the way private enterprise would. Too bad for the American taxpayer.