" Cash for Clunklers" Breaks Down..

... and this is going to be somewhat of an embarrassment for the Obama administration.
The " cash for clunkers " program had just gotten started this past Monday, with some $950 million dollars of taxpayer cash and the cash has already been used up! I guess that the government hadn't counted on the program being so popular as it is.
This leaves the Obama team having to search for some more cash in order to keep the program active. Auto dealers have let the government know that the funds are gone and this little problem also has the dealers concerned because they are worried that the funds will not be around in order to complete some of the deals that are already in the works.

Calls to suspend the plan came after auto dealers warned the government
that it was in danger of losing count of how many trades had been made. Since
the program was to run as long as there was money left in the $950 million pool,
dealers have been concerned the fund could run dry before they were
reimbursed for all their deals — which require them to junk the clunker.
The plan offering owners of old cars and trucks $3,500 or $4,500 toward
a new, more-efficient vehicle has proven wildly popular, with 22,782 trades
certified by federal officials since Monday. But the National Highway
Traffic Safety Administration told dealers Wednesday that a vast majority of
transactions submitted were being rejected for incomplete or illegible
paperwork.

A survey of 2,000 dealers by the National Automobile Dealers
Association, the results of which were obtained by McClatchy Newspapers,
found about 25,000 deals not yet approved by NHTSA, or about 13 trades per
store. With 23,005 dealers asking to be part of the program, auto dealers
may have already arranged the sale of more than the 250,000 vehicles that federal officials expected the plan to generate. http://www.tampabay.com/incoming/article1023508.ece

Several Michigan lawmakers have vowed to press for more money for the program, which had originally been set for $4 billion. But Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has said she would block additional money unless the program was changed to boost the gains in fuel economy between old and new models.

Maybe the Congress could take back some of the casg given to the big brokerage firms and hand it over to this program. This would be a stimulus that the people of America can live with, seeing that the cash is actually going in at the bottom and then working its way up throughout the economic chain.