Germany is the model for governments around the western world, where February car sales were up 21 percent. Implementations in Texas and California -- several other states have pilot programs -- have, indeed, spurred new car sales. The U.K. is considering it, pleased as punch that a program can be both environmentally-conscious and good for struggling auto makers and dealers!

But something troubles: the program is not, by most reasonable analyses, very good for the environment. Steven Levitt argues that the incentives are all wrong; the House version might encourage car owners to drive their gas-guzzlers longer to score the bigger cash bonus. George Monbiot looks at consulting data coming out of the U.K. and does his own analysis; how much would the government pay to save a ton of carbon emissions? He comes up with a terrible number and castigates the idea as "hand-outs for the car firms, resprayed green to fool the incautious buyer" and decides "you'd get almost as much value for money by reclassifying ten-pound notes as biomass and burning them in power stations."

Monbiot reserves no charity for the consultants who prepared the analysis. "I would have liked to give you some transport comparisons, but McKinsey doesn't publish figures for public transport or for promoting walking or cycling (a McKinsey consultant wouldn't be seen dead on a bus). Nor, as far as I can discover, does the government. The carbon payback for other projects -- creating better cycle lanes in towns and coach lanes on motorways, helping children to walk to school, better enforcement of speed limits, better timetabling for buses -- is likely to be hundreds or thousands of times higher than any returns from the scrappage scam," he writes.

So it's not green, and it doesn't really make sense financially. It's pure handouts for the auto manufacturers. But does it hurt anything? Well, yes. Scrappage connotes scrapping, and throwing away one's car when it ages into the incentive system. What will the government do with the cars? No one knows, though it's safe to say they won't be re-sold to other Americans; sold for parts and scrap metal, perhaps, or stuck in a giant pile of smushed cars somewhere. It reminds me of the digital TV conversion: let's relegate millions of analog televisions, pierced with toxic heavy metals, to the trash heap by mandating digital signals! What a great idea! Only this law would make a new crop of cars obsolete, and ready for the scrap yard, every year, endlessly refreshing our waste stream and putting money in the pockets of the most profligate consumers to do it again.

This whole concept is the institutionalization of planned obsolescence; you'd think we would have learned.