Cash for Clunkers hurt poor and unemployed drivers

One year later, Cash for Clunkers was still a dumb, economically harmful idea:

IN THE market for a used car? Good luck finding a bargain: The price of “pre-owned’’ vehicles has climbed considerably over the past year. ...

No great insight was needed to realize that Cash for Clunkers would work a hardship on people unable to afford a new car. “All this program did for them,’’ I wrote last August, “was guarantee that used cars will become more expensive. Poorer drivers will be penalized to subsidize new cars for wealthier drivers.’’ ...

When all is said and done, Cash for Clunkers was a deplorable exercise in budgetary wastefulness, asset destruction, environmental irrelevance, and economic idiocy.

The reason Cash for Clunkers pushed up used car prices is because it required that perfectly functional used cars be destroyed, thus decreasing the supply of used cars available to poorer drivers.