Government’s Crystal Ball is Cloudy

This week has proven several of our older editorials were correct. Way back when the Cash for Clunkers program started we wrote the program was poorly planned, poorly implemented and would have no effect on pollution. We wrote it was raising the cost of used cars and punishing the poor.

Recently (four years and 3 billion dollars later) Cash for Clunkers was evaluated by the Brookings Institution. “The evidence suggests that the $2.85 billion in vouchers had a small and short-lived impact on Gross Domestic Product.” The program “reduced gasoline consumption by a total of 7.9 days of national consumption.”

Cash for Clunkers was an abject failure.

We also wrote regarding forcing gasoline distributors to mix ethanol with gasoline was counter productive and actually increased pollution and fossil fuel consumption, raised food prices, and damaged the environment.

The most recent report by Associated Press confirms our opinions.

A new AP investigation has revealed that the United States’ ethanol mandate, started by President Bush and implemented by the Obama Administration, “has almost no positive effects and is severely harming the environment. Since 2008 five million acres of land set aside for conservation have been lost in the drive to harvest more corn for ethanol. This has released previously trapped carbon dioxide.”

The AP reports, “Billions of pounds of fertilizer were also used on land, some of which has leaked into drinking water, rivers, and has expanded the Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone, which can no longer support life.”

Even the Washington Post recently published a story headlined “Time to kill the corn ethanol mandate.”

We’re not writing this to gloat and say “we were right and they were wrong.”

The point is this: When you remove the political maneuvering, the self-serving business interests and the extremist rhetoric from the equation and evaluate a potential program based on facts using basic math it is easy to determine if a course of action is advisable.

WE shouldn’t have to endure four years of higher fuel prices, damage to engines, higher food prices and environmental damage to determine what anyone could have discovered years ago.

The same is true of the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare. Remove the rhetoric, examine the facts and it can’t work, it won’t work and it cannot be made to work.

Don’t take our word for it. Just wait a few more years and read it in the Washington Post.