TakeAway: Under Cash for Clunkers, some owners of large pickups cashed in old trucks for between $3,500 and $4,500 toward new Hummer H3 SUVs that got only 16 mpg.
Source: Associated Press: Clunker pickups traded for new pickups, Nov 4, 2009
The most common deals under the government’s $3 billion Cash for Clunkers program, aimed at putting more fuel-efficient cars on the road, replaced old Ford or Chevrolet pickups with new ones that got only marginally better gas mileage.
The single most common swap — which occurred more than 8,200 times — involved Ford F150 pickup owners who took advantage of a government rebate to trade their old trucks for new Ford F150s. The fuel economy for the new trucks ranged from 15 mpg to 17 mpg based on engine size and other factors, an improvement of just 1 mpg to 3 mpg over the clunkers.
Owners of thousands more large old Chevrolet and Dodge pickups bought new Silverado and Ram trucks, also with only barely improved mileage in the middle teens,.
Those deals helped the Ford F150 and Chevy Silverado — along with Ford’s Escape midsize SUV — climb into the Top 10 most-popular vehicles purchased with the government rebates. The most common truck-for-truck and truck-for-SUV deals totaled at least $911 million.
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In scores of deals, the government reported spending a total of $562,500 in rebates for new cars and trucks that got worse or the same mileage as the trade-ins — in apparent violation of the program’s requirements.
More than 95,000 of the new vehicles purchased under the program — or about one in seven — got less than 20 mpg, according to the data.
Plenty of consumers bought relatively low-mileage trucks and SUVs with the help of government checks.
Full story:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091104/ap_on_bi_ge/us_cash_for_clunkers
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On the plus side:
Popular high-mileage commuter cars including the Toyota Corolla, Honda Civic, Toyota Camry and Ford Focus also were among the Top 10 most popular new vehicles bought under the four-week program, with 105,280 of those models sold for a total of about $2 billion.
The Homa Files 
November 10, 2009 at 3:19 pm |
And this was just a $2.8 billion program. So I wonder – how well will the government administer its proposed shiny new $1 trillion+ “healthcare reform?”
+ Government administered health care cost taxpayers $754 billion in 2007, according to the government (http://www.cms.hhs.gov/NationalHealthExpendData/downloads/tables.pdf).
+ According to a recent 60 Minutes report (http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=5419933n&tag=related;photovideo), Medicare and Medicaid fraud totals $90bn per year, and is so easy ‘a fifth grader’ could perform it.
+ $90bn of fraud out of $754bn means that roughly 12 cents for every healthcare dollar currently managed by the government is wasted – and that is irrefutable waste.
+ The waste figure is probably actually a lot higher – fraud of the VA, DOD, and other government-run healthcare isn’t included in the 60 Minutes numerator, but the cost is included in the NHE denominator. Add in needless testing and surgeries, as well as the fact that the government spending numbers include a lot more than medical claim payments (e.g. bloated beurocracy, some (but clearly not enough) budget to investigate fraud, etc.) and there’s no telling how high it could be.
+ But let’s just use the math in front of us – $90 billion in fraud on $754 billion in spend. That means that every time the government spends 8 dollars on healthcare, a dollar is stolen.
If I sent a child to the store to buy food to feed my family, but every 8th day he came back from the store with nothing (due to any number of factors), would my best course of action would be to:
a. take measures to ensure that the chances of the child returning empty-handed were greatly reduced? or
b. give the child twice as much money from now on, and hope for the best?
Not to oversimplify – there are people out there who need health coverage who can’t get it or can’t afford it, and we need to cover those people (as long as they want to be covered, and are legally in the country – or can prove that they’re making good faith efforts to gain legal status).
But the government has proved itself singularly unable to administer the current government-run healthcare system effectively, after having had 50 years to tinker with it. So what we don’t need is the government to step in, take more control, and lose more taxpayer dollars to fraud.
What they can do is come up with a stop-gap plan for those who don’t qualify for Medicaid and those left uninsured due to pre-existing conditions. That will be a much smaller, more manageable program, possible by simply expanding Medicaid, and cost a heck of a lot less.
That will buy the government time to get serious about the business of running a healthcare system. Reduce fraud to <1%. Then come ask taxpayers to give them more money for universal healthcare. Maybe then we'll listen.