How should we have known that the Obama administration would veer from malignant accomplishment to staggering incompetence?

From its first major initiative: Cash for Clunkers.

Jalopnik reports:

You’ll recall that Cash for Clunkers gave buyers up to $4,500 in vouchers to trade in older cars for new one. The goal was to stimulate then-lagging auto sales and hopefully get old, smog-spewing vehicles off the road for good in exchange for newer, cleaner ones.

But the Brookings Institution reports Cash for Clunkers wasn’t all that great as far as economic stimulus programs go. As noted in the Washington Post, almost any other program would have been better in that regard.

Their biggest beef is jobs created by Cash for Clunkers, and how expensive that ended up being:

[The Brookings Institution’s Ted Gayer and Emily Parker] estimate that pulling these vehicle sales forward probably boosted GDP by about $2 billion and created around 2,050 jobs. That means the program cost about $1.4 million per job created — far less effective than other conventional fiscal stimulus measures, such as cutting payroll taxes or boosting unemployment benefits.

Emphasis mine. More cost-effective ways of adding those jobs include reducing the employee and employer payroll tax and boosting unemployment aid, they say. The Post cites another study that said the 2009 Recovery Act could have been 30 percent more effective had it focused more on aid to states and payroll tax cuts.

Another issue is whether Cash for Clunkers really aided car sales in the long run. The Brookings people say Cash for Clinkers just made Americans purchase cars slightly earlier than they would have otherwise: Cumulative purchases in 2009 were basically unchanged, the report says.

Now, it’s not all doom and gloom when it comes to Cash for Clunkers, except of course for all those genuinely awesome performance cars that got junked in the process. The Post says the program was indeed successful at cutting down on carbon dioxide emissions — the equivalent of taking up to 5 million cars off the road for a year even though only 700,000 old cars were traded in. However, they say it would not have been as cost-effective as implementing a carbon tax.

Plus, there was no guarantee that buyers would get into something truly more efficient than their old cars:

The 2011 Resources for the Future study found that Cash for Clunkers increased average fuel economy in the United States by just 0.65 miles per gallon. But, similarly, that study found that there were far cheaper ways to achieve similar savings.

There are a couple reasons the savings might have been so small. For one thing, the fuel-economy requirements were relatively lax: A person could, in theory, trade in a Hummer that got 14 mpg and get a $3,500 voucher for a new 18-mpg SUV. What’s more, the gain in efficiency would be partially offset by the energy costs involved in manufacturing the new car.

It costs energy to build new cars! Shocking.

I could not care less about reducing carbon dioxide emissions. That pales in comparison to the grotesque waste of destroying functioning cars. Care to guess the repossession rate of new cars purchased by people who had “clunker” cars precisely because they couldn’t afford new cars? Meanwhile, cars that could have served as functional transportation for poor people were crushed — not even stripped for usable parts such as tires. As a result, used cars today are less affordable than they were five years ago.

As for the “stimulus,” the Post reports:

Why does this matter? It was just one tiny program, after all. Yet inefficient stimulus programs add up. One recent study by economists Gerald Carlino and Robert Inman found that the 2009 Recovery Act could have been fully 30 percent more effective in boosting the economy if it had been better designed (i.e., more focused on things like aid to states and payroll tax cuts).

It would have been preferable for all of the Big Three to go out of business (which wouldn’t have happened anyway) than to have had the Cash for Clunkers abomination.