{"id":81,"date":"2009-07-31T09:10:34","date_gmt":"2009-07-31T14:10:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2009\/07\/31\/cash_for_clunkers_more_immoral_environmentalism\/"},"modified":"2009-07-31T09:10:34","modified_gmt":"2009-07-31T14:10:34","slug":"cash_for_clunkers_more_immoral_environmentalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2009\/07\/31\/cash_for_clunkers_more_immoral_environmentalism\/","title":{"rendered":"Cash for Clunkers: More Immoral Environmentalism?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Update (Friday afternoon): According to the Wall Street Journal, the House has voted to pour another $2 billion into Cash for Clunkers.<\/em><\/p>\n

Once a month, I volunteer at our church’s benevolence office, where we interview people in need of financial assistance and try to determine whether and how we can help them. Most of these folks are unemployed or under-employed, and often we find that they lack basic everyday transportation that would allow them to get and keep a job. Midland’s bus system, although much improved, does not always provide the flexibility of routes and schedules that allow people to count on them for their work commutes.<\/p>\n

Which brings us to “Cash for Clunkers” which, as you already know, is a federal government program designed to reward people for trading in their old gas guzzlers for new, more fuel-efficient vehicles. CARS (Car Allowance Rebate System) was funded with $1B of your and my money, and will theoretically remove at least 220,000 older cars from the roads (assuming the maximum allowance of $4,500). That sounds fine and dandy, although it still represents only about 1% of the total number of passenger vehicles in the country and the incremental overall gains in fuel economy will be trivial.<\/p>\n

Setting aside the issue of taxpayer money being used yet again to try to influence private behavior, I find it sad, if not immoral, that all the cars being traded in will simply be crushed* and consigned to a junkyard. There are a lot of people in the country for whom ownership of a “clunker” could mean a chance to climb out of a poverty-stricken or abuse-laden situation.<\/p>\n

Yet again, we see that actions taken in the name of environmentalism have negative consequences on the human condition. Similar to (although I’d argue not quite as heinous) diverting corn to make fuel rather than food, these actions argue that a future “greater good” is being served, but the hypocrisy is that human beings are being harmed now.<\/p>\n

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that those who are able to take advantage of CARS are doing bad things. Not at all. I’d use it if I could; after all, it’s my money they’re handing out. I simply wish the program had a better ending.<\/p>\n

*Wonder how many of these “clunkers” will actually get scrapped, rather than ending up in, say, Mexico?<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Diverting corn from food to fuel is a bad idea, and so is crushing clunkers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-society-culture","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}