pork barrel spending

Cash for Clunkers Sputters to an End

by Ivan Osorio on August 20, 2009 · 2 comments

in Bailout Watch, Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Features, Mobility, Zeitgeist

The Transportation Department announced today that it will wind down the Cash for Clunkers program, which the Obama administration promoted as a way to both help the economy and clean up the environment, by Monday. It was supposed to spur car sales while replacing older cars with more fuel-efficient models.

As I noted here in an earlier post, “The car buying site Edmunds.com compared car sales under Cash for Clunkers with typical car sales over a similar period as that of the program’s existence, and found a net increase of only 50,000 cars — at a cost of $20,000 each.”

For more on Cash for Clunkers, see here.

Is the TARP Unconstitutional?

by Ivan Osorio on January 27, 2009 · 2 comments

in Bailout Watch, Economy, Legal

Also at Heritage today, FreedomWorks chief economist Wayne Brough described his organization’s legal analysis of the constitutionality of the Troubled Assets Relief Program. “There is a very strong non-delegation argument against the TARP,” he said. “They basically took all the debate out of the Congress and put it all in the Treasury in the Executive branch…They gave the Treasury a $700-billion blank check to spend at whim.”

For more on bailouts, see BeyondBailouts.org, a project of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the National Taxpayers Union, as well as John Berlau’s entry on bailouts in CEI’s new Agenda for Congress.