Cash for clunkers becomes law, will never go away

So the inevitable occurred. President Obama signed cash for clunkers – as part of the war spending bill – into law yesterday. It’s now officially called CARS (Car Allowance Rebate System), and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which will oversee CARS, is already warning about scams that look like official information sources but which are really just email and phone number harvesters.

I’ll reiterate again: We’re glad SEMA was able to get a 25-year provision inserted into the law; doing so prevents any car older than 1984 from being crushed and thus going through the natural automotive life cycle. But we’re still opposed to this legislation on behalf of all future collectible vehicles and all future vehicle collectors. Quite simply, we don’t know what vehicles will become collectible in the future. Maybe, as one of our commenters posited earlier, the youth of today will collect minivans when they get old and gray. Thirty years ago, nobody could have predicted that people today will find station wagons or Edsels collectible. Sixty years ago, nobody could have predicted that Model Ts would eventually become collectible.

Yes, the version of cash for clunkers passed into law is time-limited to one year four months. Yes, the version passed into law became defanged by compromise. The environmentalists who campaigned for it are disappointed that it didn’t impose stricter mileage requirements. The industrialists who campaigned for it are disappointed that its funding got slashed from $4 billion to $1 billion, enough to theoretically fund 250,000 car purchases, not nearly enough to put a dent in the car sales slump. The consumer protectionists who campaigned for it are disappointed that it will only help a narrow slice of the population get into further debt.

In each instance of disappointment, you can read between the lines (or read it outright, as the Washington Post wrote a couple days ago): They see this as a trial balloon, from which they can determine how to beef up further cash for clunkers legislation, how to get more funding for it, how to sell more new cars with it. They’re already looking forward to Round Two. Which speaks to the largest danger of this program: It sets a precedent. It gets a toe in the door. From here, any expansion or extension of the program becomes possible.

UPDATE (25.June 2009): One thing that’s bothered me in recent weeks has been the lack of a mention of the exact bill to which this legislation was attached. That’s probably because the cash for clunkers legislation jumped around Congress like a mad monkey for the last few weeks. The version that the House passed earlier this month was H.R.2751, a standalone bill, but ultimately, the cash for clunkers legislation was attached to H.R.2346, the war spending bill. Specifically, it’s Title XIII of H.R.2346. Read it for yourself, please.

UPDATE (25.June 2009): Popular Mechanics gets it.

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