So we spend $1 billion and what do we get?

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Ford Motor Co. said Monday that U.S. July sales rose 2.3% to 165,279 vehicles, reversing nearly two years of monthly year-over-year losses.

Ok.  So for $1 billion Ford managed to sell 3,801 more vehicles this month compared to last year's number, and now is pushing a roughly 2 million unit/year run rate.

Hmmmm...

In addition to this (tiny) impact over last year, we have done the following:

• Removed more-guzzling cars from the road and replaced them with less-guzzling (good).
• Significantly shifted the sales matrix toward smaller, more efficient - but far less profitable vehicles (not so good.)
• Taken someone who had a paid-off car and thus no auto debt (good) and replaced that with someone who now has a huge car payment on a vehicle worth less than the loan amount the instant they drive it off the lot (bad).
• Destroyed the engine (the most valuable part) of that older vehicle, thereby trashing the business of both used car lots and automotive recyclers and used parts dealers (very bad.)

A good idea?  Well, I suppose if the intent is to try to get Americans to be more of a debt slave when they're already choking on too much debt.......

But net-on-net for the economy?  Assuming gas goes to $5/gallon (and if crude's move of late, doubling in the last few months, is any indication that's exactly what we'll soon be seeing) and presuming an average purchase price of $20,000, ignoring finance charges (hah!) we're talking about 4,000 gallons of gasoline.

If the average clunker got 15 miles per gallon the driver of said clunker would have to put an additional 60,000 miles on it before he paid just the principal on that note.

That's a very nice debt trap you crafted there Mr. President, and utterly unsupportable on the economics.