Aug 20 2009
Cash for Clunkers ends Monday
Car buyers eager to take advantage of President Barack Obama’s Cash for Clunkers rebates had better hurry up. The deal, which gives car buyers rebates of $3,500 or $4,500 to trade in older vehicles for newer and more fuel-efficient models, is set to close on Monday.
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood called the program “a lifeline to the automobile industry, jump starting a major sector of the economy and putting people back to work.”
Through Thursday auto dealers had made deals worth $1.9 billion and the incentives from the program had generated more than 457,000 vehicle sales. Cash for Clunkers was so popular in fact that consumers were set to exhaust the entire $3 billion in spending allotted for the program by September.
“I think if we can get a clean cutoff Monday and get everything processed by then, it will have been a pretty darned successful program,” said John McEleney, chairman of the National Automobile Dealers Association.
I for one think this idea was a great one and I hope it’s a strategy that Obama looks to in the future. Cash for Clunkers boosted car sales (and therefore saved jobs) in a recession when no one was buying cars. It was able to achieve this by rewarding people on Main Street rather than corporate CEO’s.
The cherry on top? While helping to stimulate the economy the program also made America more energy efficient, which was another one of Obama’s goals.
Creative solutions like this are why the American people voted so overwhelmingly to select Barack Obama as our 44th President. They recognized that we needed someone who could think outside of the box to deal with the complex problems facing our country and they thought Barack Obama was the best man for that job. This was a good idea, but we’re going to need a lot more of them to get America back on track.
