Default America: Cash for Clunkers

Cash for Clunkers is a catchy title, like Cash for Caulkers, TARP: trouble asset relief program and don't forget about the appliances deal. One might wonder how successful these programs have been to get us out of this recession.

NATS - Car crusher
"Even though it was a small program I think the cash for clunkers [NATS] is sort of in a nutshell"
0:10 [SUPER] Joe Salerno - Professor of Economics - Lugwig Von Mises Institute
"what government spending and stimulus projects do"

NATS - Car crusher
"Looking at the actual results of some of these quick fix policies in the past, they show that yeah it provides a good bump"
0:23 [SUPER] Tim Shaughnessy - Professor of Economics - Louisiana State University
"temporarily, but over the long haul it actually creates more problems than it tried to fix"

0:29 [SUPER] Chris Combs - Professor of Economics - Louisiana State University
"It's one of the general principals of economics is that beware or the secondary effects. Good intentions don't always lead to good outcomes"

NATS - Car crusher
NATS - Money printing

"What actually occurred there. What happened was the government printed money or used tax money to buy assets that were perfectly useable, and to destroy them, thinking that the spending is what drives the economy to prosperity. But it's not spending, spending is based on money, and money is not wealth"

"You got the people that were maybe going to buy next year, who said well, it pays to go and buy the car this year. So what are they not selling next year, that car"

"What they were doing in effect was replacing real resources, these automobiles that still ran, with paper money. And that is not the path to prosperity, that is the path to destruction"

1:27 [SUPER] Dr. Loren Scott - Professor of Economics - Louisiana State University Baton Rouge
"and you have people in charge right now that have never run a business, haven't the foggiest clue about that. And as a result you are going to have some unintended consequences in these laws they never thought of because that's just not the way they think"

"You can buy many things. The government can spend on buying older buildings and destroy them"

NATS - downtown bus

"Anything that that program can do an earthquake could do"

1:52 [SUPER] Cody Jennings - Videographer -- cjenning@ksla.com

"Because by destroying a city, well oh we have to spend to rebuild the city. But in the mean time all those resources could have been used to produce other useful things. Now we are trying to replace something that we have destroyed"

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• peter
• schiff
• bailout
• inflation
• nation
• depression
• hyperinflation
• dollar
• decline

[jmelkis]

Artificial scarcity drives the prices of used cars higher. It is touted as "oh, your car is worth more." But it's more like we have made cars more scarce, so now you have to pay more.

Thanks for putting this out. It's nice to see that not all economists support this garbage.