OK, so if you have 15K lying around to buy a new car minus $4500, you can take your perfectly good older car and trade it in. Then the government crushes it and subsidizes your purchase of a new, “more efficient” car (ecological costs of making said car not included).

The government crushes it?????

This is incredibly shortsighted. I saw the list of the top ten “clunkers” being turned in. Seven of them are Ford Explorers between 5 and 10 years old. Now Explorers aren’t the most efficient cars, but they are a hell of a lot better than some of the smoke spewing 1970’s sedans and pickups on our roads. The people driving those sedans certainly can’t afford to trade in their clunkers, so why not allow them to take the Explorers for a few hundred bucks and then crush the real gas guzzlers?