By all measures, cash for clunkers has been a wild success.  More than 700,000 cars have been sold in about 3 weeks.  Even though some claim that only 200,000 of those would not have been sold at some point otherwise, that’s still huge.  And all of this has cost $3B of taxpaper money.

The leverage, however, has been huge.  If the average sale is $20,000, and the average rebates is $4,000, there’s a 5x multiplier on a boost to the economy.  I don’t know what other stimulus funds have had a 5x boost.

I strongly feel we should reduce the cash for clunkers fee to $2,000 for two months, and then $1,000 for two months and allow up to $5B or $10B more, since we can then get 10x or 20x multiplier at that reduced amount.

I feel that we need to find more of this kind of stimulus – if we are going to provide stimulus at all.  We gave $50B to the car companies immediately and got nothing like this bang for the buck – for less than 1/5^th that amount we could do so much more.

Am I missing something here?  I’d love to hear what any downside of this could be.

Earlier this week, we launched a first-of-its-kind solar power plant.  It’s a solar power tower, the only one in the United States, and it is unique for a few reasons.  First of all, it uses 24,000 tracking flat mirrors, as opposed to a small number of curved mirrors.  This allows the plant to use less steel, which makes it more cost effective.  In return for using less steel, the plant requires more software, which was very expensive to develop, but once developed, replicating it is nearly free.

You can read more about it and see pictures at http://www.esolar.com/