whats the most significant cost most people don think of?
People don’t realize how many of their tax dollars go to support the infrastructure of automobiles. We all want the government to keep investing in roads and bridges. But I don’t think there’s a sense of how many tax dollars go toward industry subsidies. For example, the recent “Cash For Clunkers” program was lauded as a boon for consumers — rather than a $3 billion cost to taxpayers. It’s been shown to have had a very modest impact on the health of the American automakers, to have been unlikely to have made a significant environmental impact, and to have been quite costly to taxpayers. In essence, all of us paid so that some of us could have new cars. And of course those most hurt by the recession, the under- and unemployed, could not afford to take advantage of the program. Infrastructure, subsidies to the industry, crash costs, health care costs from crashes, costs to maintain a first-responder system for crashes, the long-term health costs — those are all costs we don’t look at.
