Whip Recession Now

President Gerald Ford urged people to wear "WIN" buttons so we could "Whip Inflation Now."

That stunt was as useless as Cash for Clunkers. But unlike Cash for Clunkers, WIN didn’t encourage fraud and and it didn’t distort the market. Cash for Clunkers does both.

The car trade-in program was supposed to help the environment by getting smoke-belching bombs off the road.

The cars were supposed to be destroyed. But since many of them are valuable, what are the odds that all those dealers, after filling out the tedious government paperwork, really would destroy all those cars?

Some have expressed concern that vehicles that should have been destroyed in the Cash for Clunkers program may turn up on a used car sales lot...

Carfax.com now has that information on its Web site, allowing people to enter a vehicle identification number to check if the vehicle they want to buy might be registered as a clunker for free. Carfax spokesman Larry Gamache said some "clunkers" are back on the road in spite of a promise that they be destroyed. "We fully expect that clunker vehicles are going to be with us for a long time," Gamache said. "It's just too much incentive for conmen to make a quick buck."

Who could have predicted that?