Coyote Blog

Tiffany’s is (hypothetically) handing out coupons for 50% off diamond necklaces.  This generates a lot of press, but you do not get a coupon.  Are you, without a coupon, more likely to buy a necklace anyway given all the publicity?  Or is your behavior unchanged, because you received no inventive?  Or are you perhaps less likely to buy, with the full retail price you would be paying now seeming higher as compared to the 50% off others are getting?

This issue seems to be at the heart of the conflict between the Obama administration and Edmunds.com (what is it about this administration and picking battles with media companies?)  In their analysis, Edmunds said that only about 250,000 of the auto sales during the cash-for-clunkers period were incremental.  The White House says they are underestimating, because even people who did not qualify for the program bought more cars because of the program:

The White House said [totally great car-buying, car-selling, and all-around-awesome-info site for every goddamn great and awful car website] Edmunds based its analysis on the “implausible” assumption that “the market for cars that didn’t qualify for cash for clunkers was completely unaffected by this program. In other words, all the other cars were being sold on Mars, while the rest of the country was caught up in the excitement of the cash for clunkers program.”…

Edmunds stands by its analysis.

“Instead of shooting the messenger, government officials should take heart from the core message of the analysis: The fundamentals of the auto marketplace are improving faster than the current sales numbers suggest,” [Edmunds jefe Jeremy] Anwyl wrote.

The central issue, Anwyl said, “is how many of these sales would have occurred anyway. Apparently, the $24,000 figure caught many by surprise. It shouldn’t have. The truth is that consumer incentive programs are always hugely expensive when calculated by incremental sales — always in the tens of thousands of dollars.”

Edmunds rejected the White House suggestion that people got caught up in the excitement of the program and bought cars, even if they didn’t qualify. And it discarded the notion that automakers boosted production solely because of the program.

“No manufacturer increases production, a decision with long-term consequences, based on the 30-day sales blip triggered by an event like cash for clunkers,” Edmunds wrote.

Its an interesting question.  I would tend to come down on Edmunds’ side from my own experience running promotions, but it is not totally cut and dried.  I can think of at least two examples where a discount to person A yields more sales to person B, but neither are really applicable here

• Example 1:  Ladies night.  Cheap drinks for the ladies bring in male customers, on the theory that that are looking for bars with, frankly, lots of drunk women
• Example 2:  Kids eat free.  Restaurants have programs with discounted or free kids meals to get their parent’s business

I think one could actually make the argument that people who did not get the clunker discount would be less likely to buy, as its really hard to buy something for X when you know all the people around you are getting it for (X-$3000)**.  This isn’t an absolute rule – after all, people fly all the time next to folks who paid more or less for the same service.  But I do think it is a psychological issue that would tend to offset the general excitement around the program.  In the end, we won’t have to guess, once we get sales data for the rest of the year and we can see if clunkers merely moved sales forward a few months or generated incremental sales.

**  As shown here, cash for clunkers amounted to about a $3000 subsidy per buyer, above and beyond the blue book value of the car turned in.

The answer is:  Just about everyone who was not in the tank for the Obama Administration predicted this (from my Princeton classmate Henry Payne):

When Congress gave away $3 billion for buyers to trade in their “clunkers” and buy new cars in August, lawmakers thrilled as buyers swamped showrooms to take advantage of the big discounts. “Cash for clunkers has captured the public’s attention . . . (it) has the possibility to truly jumpstart our economy,” said Rep. Candice Miller (R., Mich.). Other, more sober analysts, warned that the clunkers program was only stealing from future sales.

September sales are in, and sobriety can take a bow.

Edmunds.com reports that “September’s light-vehicle sales rate will fall to 8.8 million units . . . the lowest rate in nearly 28 years, tying the worst demand on record. After the cash-for-clunkers program boosted August sales to their first year-over-year increase since October 2007, demand has plunged. In at least the last 33 years, the U.S. seasonally adjusted annual rate has only dropped as low as 8.8 million units once — in December 1981 — with records stretching back to January 1976.”

The real popularity of the program was always due to the fact that the government was throwing money away and people rushed to pick it up.  Edwards.com estimated the Feds purchased vehicles with average blue book values of just under $1500 for $3500 to $4500.  That means that the government purchased cars that blue booked at just over a billion dollars for three billion.  I you suddenly offered to buy all of your neighbors’ cars for three times what they were worth, you’d be popular too.   It was a $2 billion giveaway, and people rushed to pick the cash up like one of those money drops in the outfield of a minor league baseball game.  In doing so, the government made a trivial change in the overall fleet fuel economy, in the process overpaying for Co2 reduction by a factor of 20.

Update: The study linked above shows the government paying over $400 per ton of Co2 reduced in the Clunkers program.  The 20x factor cited was based on an estimated clearing price of a tone of Co2 in a future cap and trade system.  This is hypothetical, as currently a ton of Co2 offsets trades right now in the US at 20 cents.  At this price, the program overpaid by a factor of 2000.  To be fair, this reflects both estimated pricing as well as a discount for the likelihood of a cap and trade bill passing.

The AZ Republic is at it again, cheer-leading any program that spends more taxpayer money, even to the extent of blatant editorializing in a news article.  From an article on cash for clunkers (emphasis added):

The program leveraged $3 billion in clunker rebates into $20 billion-plus in new-car sales. That far exceeded the initial goals for what is arguably the most successful of the government’s recent economic-stimulus programs.

Here are the sum total of the sources quoted to reach this conclusion:

• Scott Gruwell, general-sales manager of Courtesy Chevrolet in Phoenix
• U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood
• Bobbi Sparrow, president of the Arizona Automobile Dealers Association
• Arizona MVD spokesman

So lets see — the article quoted three groups that receive money from the program plus the administrator of the program.  Can’t get more balanced than that.  I am not really good with the pithy 200-word letter to the editor, but I sent this in today:

Max Jarman and Betty Beard wrote that the cash for clunkers program “is arguably the most successful of the government’s recent economic-stimulus programs.”  Admittedly this is a low bar, but what evidence do they have of “success?”

Car buyers, they argue, really like the program.  Edmunds.com estimates that the government has been paying $3500 to $4500 for vehicles that have a blue book value averaging just under $1500 each.  Of course participants are happy – the government is effectively buying dollar bills for three dollars each!  But is this really a reasonable way to spend taxpayer money?

Car dealers also seem to be ecstatic about the program.  I would be too if the government gave my customers $3 billion of other people’s money to buy products from my business.  But why are auto dealers more worthy of such largess than appliance dealers, or home builders, or even massage therapists?

Not mentioned in the article are the other 99% of car owners and business that did not participate in the program.  Unseen and unspoken for are the businesses and individuals who are $3 billion poorer because the government has chosen to divert this money to a more politically-favored industry.

From Edmunds:

Consumers who traded in their clunkers through the program also benefitted financially, generally speaking. Based on preliminary data, Edmunds.com estimates that the average cash value of the traded-in clunkers was $1,475. The owners of those vehicles earned rebates for either $3,500 or $4,500, depending on the replacements vehicles they chose. Edmunds.com Senior Analyst David Tompkins, PhD, points out that many will also save money on gas each month, thanks to their more efficient new purchases.

So the government is paying consumers $4500 for assets with a market value of $1,475.  Well of course it’s a popular program with its participants — Obama is buying up dollar bills for $3.

Left undetermined is whether consumers have been enticed into more expensive cars they cannot afford by this $3000 windfall.   It seems like just yesterday when the Obama administration was slamming credit card companies for enticing people into debt with low teaser rates or slamming mortgage companies for enticing people into mortgages they could not afford.

By the way, someone needs to explain the economics behind the theory that lining auto dealers pockets with taxpayer money is stimulative to the economy:

“Our analysts have determined that dealers are enjoying a 20 percent increase in gross profit per sale involving a clunker trade-in since the program launched.”

from a reader:

The White House is secretly planning to follow “Cash For Clunkers” with a new scam called “Moolah For Mainframes” that will reward CIOs for replacing mainframes with smartphones and turning data centers into wetlands. The top-secret plans also say the Administration will launch a government-run IT company in 2010 “to keep those greedy private IT companies honest.”

Since the White House has already made incursions into banking, the car industry, insurance, mortgages, and healthcare, the Administration sources said that a number of top executives in the IT industry “have become kinda jealous and angry” about the government’s lack of direct ownership in the tech business.

Using air quotes liberally, another White House source said, “The President is on “friendly terms” with many “techie CEOs” and he says they feel there’s been a “breach of etiquette” with all those other industries getting “stimulus” while the IT industry has had to “battle it out” in the marketplace with only customer revenue to “fall back” on.”

From Henry Payne:

“In apparent violation of the new cash-for-clunkers law, the Department of Transportation [DOT] is more than 10 days late in paying rebates of at least hundreds of thousands of dollars on dealer claims,” reports Automotive News….

The clunkers law signed by President Obama requires that dealers be reimbursed by the government within ten days for the $3,500 to $4,500 credits they’ve paid to customers. The DOT says it’s working through computer problems.

“Very few dealers are getting very little money,” said Bob Israel, president of the Louisiana Automobile Dealers Association. “It’s not working smoothly at all.”

David Wilson, a Toyota dealer in Orange County, Calif., has been paid for only three of 92 claims he submitted before Aug. 2, leaving him in the lurch for $374,000.

North Carolina’s Brad Wood has12 unpaid claims since Aug. 1. He’s received just $26,000 of the $319,000 in rebates he is owed. “I’ve never experienced anxiety like this in business before,” he says. “If I don’t get paid, I will have been working almost free for several months.”…

Many deals are also are getting rejections for procedural minutiae that they can’t straighten out because the 200 employees DOT has allocated program aren’t enough. Employees are inaccessible by phone or e-mail, NADA’s Wood says. The problem? Unlike the IRS, for example, which doesn’t audit every tax form, all clunkers applications must be reviewed. That’s 315,000 forms so far (for a staff of 200). Washington is scrambling to boost the number of employees to 1,000, but that will cost more money in a program already tight for cash.

Read the whole thing.  He goes on to describe the way in which the Feds are setting up dealers as the fall guy for the Fed’s failures.

Update: From Carpe Diem, on health care in Britain

1. TELEGRAPH — A quarter of a million people are waiting more than 18 weeks for treatment on the NHS, new figures show. The figures, published by the Lib Dems, show that 236,316 people are currently waiting more than 18 weeks for a range of treatments including oral surgery, rheumatology and geriatric medicine. This means that nearly 10% of patients are not being treated within the government’s waiting list target.

2. TELEGRAPH — Civitas, the think tank, blames the monolithic nature of the National Health Service for “putting the patient last”. It argues that the “customer” of the NHS business model introduced by Tony Blair and continued by Gordon Brown is the health secretary rather than the patient.

By the way, if you are intrested in free markets and economics, you really should be reading Carpe Diem. I could link almost every one of Mark Perry’s posts if I had the time.

Christopher R. Knittel of UC Davis has  a paper (pdf)  looking at likely CO2 reductions from cash-for-clunkers under a variety of assumptions.  The $416 figure per ton of CO2 avoided may actually be low, as it does not include the well-documented rebound effect of people with higher MPG cars driving more miles**.  Also, he admittedly assumes that cars being turned in will have average future driving miles for a car of similar age, though there is anecdotal evidence that in fact the cars being turned in are driven less than average.   Under these assumptions, the cost may be as high as $600-$1000 per ton.

The analysis looks pretty thoughtful, with the proviso (which the author is the first to make) that data on the program and cars bought/turned-in is still sketchy.  The interesting part was that there were no reasonable assumptions that even got the price within an order of magnitude of the $28 per ton clearing price the CBO estimates under cap-and-trade.

As a CO2 reduction program, this is the equivalent of the military’s $700 toilet seats.  But of course we all know that no one ever really considered this an environmental or even stimulus bill.   This was always first and foremost 1) another Easter egg subsidy for the middle class and 2) a back door way to subsidize GM and Chrysler to try to make the Administration’s investment in them look better.

** This is straight supply and demand — reduce the cost of miles driven, and people will drive more miles.

From CNN via NRO:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — What are people trading their clunkers in for? It depends on who you ask.

The government’s results showed small cars as the top choice for shoppers looking for Cash for Clunker deals. But an independent analysis by Edmunds.com disputed those results, and showed that two full-size trucks and a small crossover SUV were actually among the top-ten buys.

The discrepancy is a result of the methods used. Edmunds.com uses traditional sales measurements, tallying sales by make and model. The government uses a more arcane measurement method that subdivides models according to engine and transmission types, counting them as separate models.

For example, the Ford Escape is available in six different versions including two- and four-wheel drive and hybrid versions. The government counts each version as a different vehicle using guidelines from the Environmental Protection Agency. Only the front wheel drive, non-hybrid version made the government’s top ten list.

The Ford Escape crossover SUV, instead of being the seventh-most popular vehicle under the program, as the government ranked it, was actually the best seller, according to Edmunds.com. The government pegged the Ford Focus as the top seller.

Trucks tend to be available in more variations than cars. That’s because truck buyers have a wider variety of needs than car buyers, General Motors spokesman Brian Goebel said.

“There’s just so many different uses for the truck, both retail and commercial, than with car purchasers,” he said.

The Edmunds rankings, shown in the NRO link above, actually solve one problem for the Obama administration but create another.  The Edmunds list has far fewer foreign cars, overcoming the criticism the program has gotten (not from me!) for promoting sales of non-American nameplates.  But it creates another problem, in that most of the cars on the Edmunds list are relatively low MPG, obviating the whole point of the program.

I thought this was pretty illuminating, from Tim Carney via Hit and Run.  He is writing about lobbying efforts for and against an extension of cash for clunkers:

One lobbyist for this bill was Nucor Steel. In Cayuga County, N.Y., Nucor turns scrap steel into sheet metal and other steel products. The clunkers are now becoming a subsidized feedstock for Nucor, which helps explain why Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has led the push for $2 billion extra in clunker cash.

Then there’s Enterprise Rent-a-Car also backing the bill, supposedly out of solidarity with automakers. But Enterprise sells its rental cars after a few years. As a rental firm that buys its cars new, Enterprise benefits every time someone else scraps a used car.

On the other side of the lobbying debate were non-dealer auto-repair shops, whose businesses depend on used or older cars, which the owners don’t take to the dealer for repair. Also, the Automotive Aftermarket Industry Association opposed the bill.

These are the guys who can sell you the headlight for your 1998 Ford Taurus, or who rebuild an engine out of a junked car.

Shredding old cars saps both their clientele and their supply of old transmissions to rebuild.