Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Cash for Clunker Honesty Clause?

When you purchase almost any item the seller must be straight forward and explain the actual benefits of any given product; just part of honesty in advertizing. Why isn’t this approach applied to the Cash for Clunkers cash give away program?

There should be a warning statement, much like on the side of a pack of cigarettes, something along the lines, “Caution: The tax money used in the Cash for Clunkers program has been obtained at the point of a gun from fellow citizens. The actual benefit to the environment is minimal and the long term detriment to society has not been calculated.”

The government has mandated the total destruction of the motor and drive train to insure that nothing gets recycled. Does this sound a bit odd considering how recycling saves both energy and natural resources?

“Under the program, the government is advising car dealers to replace a trade-in's engine oil with a lethal sodium silicate solution and run the engine to ruin it before giving to selling the car to a scrap dealer.

The Automotive Recycler's Association says that means more waste, since the damage prevents the resale of parts like pistons as well as smaller profits for scrap yards, since it can cost $700 to $1,200 to process a car, including transport and removing toxic items like mercury.

ARA Executive Vice President Michael Wilson said that recycling auto parts saves 85 million gallons of oil per year in energy savings alone.

The two parts most in demand on the resale market are the engine block and the drive train, accounting for 60 percent of used-parts sales, he said. But when cars are scrapped, the engine block is destroyed by the silicon, and the drive train can be sold only under certain conditions.”



It all looks like smoke and mirrors to me; spend money you didn’t earn by taking the government handout money they stole from your neighbor to save the planet from cars that emit CO2 and cause global warming according to falsified data and computer generated models obtained from the EPA who is telling government they need to be more honest. Yup, sounds like our government; business as we have come to expect.

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