On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 12:05 PM, Ryan Simpkins <[email protected]>wrote:

> The questions go on, and on, and on.


Indeed.  Writing in the Freakonomics blog on the nytimes.com web site,
economist Steven Leavitt makes a similar back-of-the-napkin calculation.
 One billion dollars, presumed to have been exhausted in one week since the
program began, spent, on average, at $4000 per clunker, amounts to 250,000
new cars sold.  In one week.  That figure is *double* the average number of
cars sold per week back in 2006, long before car sales went into the gutter.
 So we're supposed to believe that the C-f-C program single-handedly
produced car sales more than double the average weekly sales figures during
a healthy auto-sales economy?  Something doesn't sound right, Mr. Leavitt
observes.

Bastiat surely is laughing at us from the great beyond.

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