Posted by Snow in 
My discussion of the Cash for Clunkers program here and elsewhere has led to spirited debate about the merits and drawbacks of this program. As there are only three more shopping days until final offers and paperwork for the Cash for Clunkers benefits can be applied for, perhaps now the truth shall set us free.
Like many people, I do not feel that Cash for Clunkersworks at a recycling level, since the abuse the clunked up, junked up, turned in vehicles take renders them landfill fodder for some time to come. Tales of cement being poured into gas tanks and carburetors acid washed like jeans filled the blogospheric waves.
What should have been done was to enter each clunker qualifying vehicle in a commodity pool with currency value and have the sales of pool parts and vehicles generate more clunker money. These vehicles could have generated actual homes for the near-numberless homeless crowding the strip malls near me.
While the goal of the Cash for Clunker program was to get more healthful vehicles on the road, many homeless people would debate the value of throwing away a viable means of both transportation and habitation.
The Cash for Clunker program was designed for those poor, downtrodden people who could drive to a car lot and qualify for low APR financing on a new car. These same people might have down payments for new cars, since their mortgages were modified with bonus payments expected in future.
I live in California, a state which lost 760,000 jobs this year. (Thanks, Arnie!) Living in Southern California means that Los Angeles, the homeless capital of the world, is close by.
That’s the official figure, by the way. If you ride empty buses in Los Angeles during rush hour you realize they were always full before. The housekeepers, gardeners, construction workers, and child-minders that worked with no papers have been let go, but those figures don’t make the books.
Foreclosures and job losses have turned my neighborhood fast-food and market mall into an arcade of homeless curb sitters and bus stop residents, hauiling their junk to and fro every morning. The same ten men sit huddled and hunkering at all hours, their lifes a repetitive cycle of non-stimulus inertia.
The homeless people that used to depend on services in downtown Los Angeles have now crept out to live in suburban environs, which they feel on the whole are safer than L.A.’s skid row. Their mortgage needs no modification. They aren’t out shopping for overpriced cars.
They don’t need to pick up the news and read it. They are the news.
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