Clunker Program

Leave it to Americans to take a good idea from someone else and screw it up royally. After the practice of government incentives to get motorists to trade in their old cars for new ones to boost economic activity worked so well in Germany, the U.S. government tried the same approach here. It was also designed to incentivize sales of more fuel-efficient cars.

Four days into the program, known as the Car Allowance Rebate System, it's been suspended. It worked too well; 22,782 trade-ins have taken place since Monday, but dealers may have arranged for more sales than the government was prepared for, and the $950 million allotted to the program to pay dealers for disabling the traded-in vehicles was practically exhausted by last night.

Plus, a lot of the paperwork has proven to be illegible.

Another $4 billion may be needed to cover all of the deals that are made, but Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California has blocked further funding in an effort to boost the fuel economy requirements. Because fuel economy improvements are not a big concern in Germany, where gas is expensive and cars are already pretty small, the Germans don't have such a problem, at least not on a huge scale.

So once again, Americans are proven to be no better at something than they are at providing quality public education, building high-speed passenger railways, or establishing public medical insurance, all of which the Germans - and others - are very good at.

Irony of ironies: A GMC ad encouraging people to buy GMC vehicles - all light trucks, none of them really all that fuel-efficient - through the Car Allowance Rebate System appeared on the opposite page of my local paper as the article about the program's collapse.