In the future, I will prefer buying cheap used cars to stay out of debt. My 97 Honda Accord has 208 K miles on it, and it is just being broken in.

Intentionally destroying something, esp something that would have otherwise been sold to the poor, goes against my nature.

The environmental issues are important, but there's an environmental cost to trashing a usable car too. The cars were inefficient, but so is destroying them. I couldn't make myself poor sand into a working motor's oil and then run it until the sand tears the insides apart.

"Cash for clunkers" was the final straw for me.

Short sighted stupidity on a level only the feds could manage. The used parts market was also adversely impacted. A bad idea all around.

The program paid people to trash perfectly good cars by running a chemical in the oil that would destroy the motors. It was disgraceful. It destroyed cars typically used by the poor. It's one of the most disgraceful things gov't did in the name of helping in my lifetime.

Another government disaster.

The other consequence they don't talk about is that it gutted the used car market at the low end. People that need cheap cars quickly found out they were disappearing like the dodo.