There Should Be an Official Cash for Clunkers Blog

... because it would solve problems like this.

Some dealers were told July 30 that the reimbursements would end at midnight. Mickey Anderson, president of Performance Automotive Group in Omaha, Nebraska, said Toyota advised him to suspend sales with “clunker” rebates after the manufacturer was notified by NHTSA that the program was halted.

“We were open until 3 a.m. last night delivering cars because customers were alarmed by the deadline and fearing they were going to be too late,” Tamara Darvish, who owns 18 automobile dealerships in the Washington area, said in a telephone interview yesterday.

This isn't a complicated program. You send in a voucher, they send you a check. The details can't be that messy, even for a government program. A simple blog would have cleared all of this up for both dealers and consumers.

Having said that, I'm totally against this. First, it's a fake stimulus. All you're doing is robbing future demand for current demand. All the cars you sell today because of a $4500 check are cars you would have sold in a couple of months anyway, but won't sell now.

Secondly, it's a good bet that most of the customers are financing their new cars. The last thing an economy going through a balance sheet recession needs is more people with more debt.

Finally, they are destroying the clunkers. Those are cars that poor families could afford to buy with cash and could still give years of service. Instead, a bunch of usable, inexpensive cars are being taken off the market permanently.

My clunkers are staying here with me, thank you very much. B-Daddy has more on this story.