Honestly I am still convinced that it was a handout, though not directly, to the auto industry because Obama had campaigned on saving Detroit but the bailouts weren’t enough to keep GM and Chrysler afloat. (Ford, in a business move that I wish was more common but also because they were dying before the recession, leveraged the blue oval logo as collateral on a loan.)
the Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS, commonly known as ‘Cash-For-Clunkers’), one of several stimulus programs whose purpose was to shift expenditures by households, businesses, and governments from future periods when the economy is likely to be stronger, to the present when the economy has an abundance of unemployed resources that can be put to work at low net economic cost.
Honestly I am still convinced that it was a handout, though not directly, to the auto industry because Obama had campaigned on saving Detroit but the bailouts weren’t enough to keep GM and Chrysler afloat. (Ford, in a business move that I wish was more common but also because they were dying before the recession, leveraged the blue oval logo as collateral on a loan.)
It was totally a handout, pretty much explicitly:
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2010/04/05/did-cash-clunkers-work-intended