Owning an older Volvo, one’s choices for sourcing parts and pieces are: eBay and its immiserating shipping costs, new Swedish imports, or the pick-n-pull down the road from nowhere. So, this afternoon, I took a walk through the scrap yard.
On a cold and sloppy day (the only kind that visits the yards), where the choices for a footpath are walking in oceanic puddles or on snow-shrouded ice floes, the man at the front desk woofs, “Whadja want?” to which one replies, “Volvo wagon.” He then will inform you to walk past the Caterpillar earth mover, down the files of domestic pickups, and through the acre-wide debris field of Volkswagens. After stumbling past your peers — fellow parts-jackals picking at the bones of automobiles — you occasionally find what you came for.
My objective was a pair of roof rack rails, and I was in luck. While the donor Volvo V70 may not have had mirrors or a live-in raccoon, it had all I could ask of it. Rails over my shoulder, I made for the front.
While hoofing it out, it was impossible to avoid wondering how much inexpensive repairability was lost to American drivers and their vehicles when the Obama administration rolled out its Car Allowance Rebate System (Cash for Clunkers). $3 billion was appropriated to pay Americans to scrap their perfectly fine vehicles in favor of more fuel-efficient rides. This program inflamed demand (increasing prices) while serviceable used cars were required to be crushed after 180 days, many with functioning components yet unharvested. While the greater Iola area isn’t flush with liberal-arts colleges, it’s worth considering how many Volvo wagons of the mid and late ’90s would have been alongside the V70 there in the yard if not for the stupidity of Keynesian central planners — a new driver’s-side mirror, a spoiler, and some mud flaps would have been nice gets. But we’ll never know, as some 125,000 fine cars were done away with so as to throw the UAW a bone and momentarily boost economic outlooks. Who cares what the future costs will be; right?
Jonah Goldberg’s 2009 analysis of the first ‘Clunker Cash’ wave ably captures the shortsightedness:
The program’s $1 billion funding evaporated in days rather than months as consumers, most of whom had been waiting to trade in their clunkers anyway, lined up for free cash. Washington is now agog with its successful effort to give out free money.
That Washington is shocked by the news that Americans like getting free money shows how thick the Beltway bubble really is.
Like the drunk who only looks for his car keys where the light is good, Washington can only see the economic activity it has created, not the activity it has destroyed.
For starters, who says the smartest thing for people with working cars is to buy new ones? Personal debt is supposed to be a problem, so why not look at this as bribing consumers into taking out car loans they don’t need? Even with the $4,500 subsidy, not all of these customers are going to be paying cash for their new cars. So they’ll be swapping serviceable-but-paid-for cars for nicer cars that are owned by banks.
$42 later, the roof rails and I drove back onto asphalt just in time for the area turkeys to gin up a traffic jam.