What a buffoon the vice-president is:
Car and Driver magazine: [Should we have] A repeat of Cash for Clunkers?
Joe Biden: Probably not. But it makes sense. One role of government is to go where venture capital won’t. In the Civil War, you had a president pay the railroads $16,000 for every mile of track they laid. You had Eisenhower invest $25 million in a defense agency called ARPA that came up with a thing that became the internet. We not only won’t get another Cash for Clunkers, but we’re having trouble keeping our friends on the other side of the aisle from doing away with what’s left of the seed money for innovative technologies that bring billions off the sidelines.
Look, Cash for Clunkers was not an investment in capital. We were paying people to destroy capital. Its total economic cost exceeded its benefits by $1000 per car. We literally would have done better simply to burn $1 billion in cash.
If you can’t understand the difference between creating capital and destroying capital, you should really avoid opining on economics altogether.
(Via the Corner.)
Internet Scofflaw 