Wildly Successful Government Program To End Monday

The Cash For Clunkers program will wrap up on Monday, a couple weeks ahead of schedule, after fueling a buying boom worth close to $15 billion dollars in sales during late July and August, and leveraging a 5:1 stimulus effect into industrial and local economies, so much so that GM has started to hire back workers. Dealers are complaining that they haven't received their money yet, but that's simply a testament to an unexpectedly successful program.

Critics have complained of administrative confusion and haste in committing the money, and some dealers have expressed concern that they were not being reimbursed quickly enough.

But the White House argued that the speed with which the money has been committed is a measure of the program's popularity.

"This is actually a high-class problem to have -- that we're selling too many cars too quickly and there's some backlog in the application process," President Barack Obama said Thursday during an interview on a nationally syndicated radio show.

I'm sure the dealers liked it better when they went a week without anyone coming on their lots. I'm sure they were thrilled with the status quo of playing Minesweeper for 8 hours a day while trying to figure out how to pay the rent. Manufacturing actually rose in July, thanks to this program.

Government stimulus works. It's as simple as that.