Preliminary sales numbers came out for August at 14.1M cars. Last month came in at 11.3M so we so quite a bump due to the Cash for Clunkers program. The real question is: how many cars did we actually incentivize the public to buy because of the cash for clunkers program? We do not care about the guy who was already going to buy a car in August, we only care about the marginal buyer who was coerced into buying a car due to the program. The sad truth is not very pretty.
There were about 940,000 cars sold in July of 2009 and we can assume that about that many cars would have been sold in August had there not been a government sponsored program. Let us assume that the difference between what was actually sold (14.1M/12)= 1.175M and what would have theoretically been sold in August of 950k was only due to the government subsidy found in the cash for clunkers program. That means that the government (taxpayer) spent $3B to incentivize (1,175,000-940,000) = 235,000 car sales. That equates to $3,000,000,000/235,000 = $12,766 taxpayer cost per car sold because of the cash for clunkers program. Even if we were to assume that August was going to be as bad as the worst month this year (April ’09) at 760,000 cars, that would still mean that we, as taxpayers, spent $7,230 per additional car sold.
Better still, only 4 of the top 10 cars purchased under the cash for clunker program were American.
What a fantastic use of taxpayer dollars.
