Has anyone really looked at the economics or even the enviromental impact of the program. Let's say the typical participant drives 12000 miles per year and goes from 20 mpg to 25 mpg. That would reduce fuel usage from 600 gallons per year to 480, saving 120 gallons per year or about $300. Saving that energy is good. But how much extra energy production is needed and pollution created by building hundreds of thousands of new cars and destroying thousands of "old" cars to get that 120 gallons of gas per year of savings? Is it a good trade-off. If it is the typical government program, the answer is almost certainly a big NO!After I wrote that I searched a couple sites that gave energy estimates for new car production in the 100 million BTU range. Each gallon of gasoline has around 120,000 BTUs of energy, so the car's production takes the energy equivalent of 833 gallons of gasoline. In the US that energy most likely comes from coal, the eeeeeeeevilest of the greenhouse gas producing fuels. So much for the 120 gallons / year savings.
Since the consumer receives either $3,500 or $4,500, but the money spent by the government per transaction amounts to (depending upon "analysis" source) $10,000-$20,000+, then the obvious answer (to a bureaucrat or politician) is a resounding, "YES!" Who is getting the rest of the money? Administrators, bureaucrats, politicians, and their cronies, of course!
Typical program, in that for every dollar to the "beneficiary", anywhere from $2 to $5 is "overhead"...but Obamacare will save money, even as C4C saves the environment and the economy.