Why not promote new home sales by burning down old homes?

If you do not know by now, the Cash for Clunkers program is looking for another $2 billion in funding since it burned through $1 billion in less than a week.  Legislators are touting this program as the most successful program of the stimulus package and that is rather scary because how much waste it actually produces.

This program essentially scraps working cars and gives consumers a voucher to buy a brand new car.  A good illustration of what happens to the “clunkers” is here on YouTube.   The sad thing about it is that the cars being traded in have to be in working condition, and none of their parts can be reused or resold.  So the result is that hundreds of thousands of perfectly good used cars are taken off the market completely to be turned into garbage.  The gas mileage requirement for the new cars are also quite low.  In some cases consumers only have to find a car that gets 1 or 2 miles per gallon to get the voucher so I am not quite sure how big of an environment benefit this would be considering that it costs quite a bit of  energy to scrap the old cars and produce new cars.  It may be much less wasteful if the old cars that got just 1 mile less per gallon were allowed to survive a bit longer.

If this is indeed the most successful part of the stimulus package then perhaps the legislators should apply the same principles of Cash for Clunkers to the housing problem.  In order to promote new home sales, perhaps home buyers should be given a credit for “trading in” their existing homes with home builders.  The old home will have to be owned for at least a year, and in habitable condition and cannot be more than 15 years old.   The new homes have to be green and use appliances that cut down on energy use by 5%.  The government will then give a voucher for  $100,000 for the old home, and then the old home has to be burned down to the ground and none of its parts can be reused.  Lets just throw $75 billion (this is the price of the ill conceived mortgage modification plan) at this hypothetical program and sell 750,000 new homes and decrease the supply of used houses by 750,000!  Sure, some neighborhoods will get uglier due to the piles of ashes, but I am sure that will stimulate new construction and create jobs!

I know that burning down homes to stimulate new home sales sounds ridiculous, but the fictional housing program I outlined above directly parallels Cash for Clunkers. If it is implemented it would probably be deemed a “success” as hundreds of thousands of people with homes worth less than $100,000 start razing their properties and buy new homes.  The government is essentially encouraging people to destroy something perfectly usable to buy something new.  Also I am sure many of these new car purchases came with new loans so once again we have government policy that encourages people to spend and get into debt.  Cash for Clunkers  certainly is stimulative for the auto industry, but it is definitely not stimulative for the environment or prudent tax payers.

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