re: #328 avanti

That is a amazing story being hyped by Fox this AM. Edmonds.com which opposed the program and cooked the figures by assuming only 125,000 of the 700,000 sales were additional sales because of the program.
They then took that much smaller figure and divided into the program cost and came up with a fake cost of $24,000 per car sold. It’s one heck of a twist in logic to assume less than 20% of the sales were caused by the rebate and has no statistical basis.

Actually, it has a very sound statistical basis that Edmonds explained in detail and which seems quite solid. I’ll let you go look it up, but the broad overview is that they compared sales of cars that weren’t covered under CfC relative to past sales and weighted for category relative to the sales of cars that were covered by the program. How is this wrong in any way? The only thing worth quibbling over is the margin of slop in the report - the delta, reported at 20%, could possibly have been as much as 30% or as little as 10% I suppose, given the uncertainties involved. But I very much doubt it was off by even a factor of two.

What’s really a twist in logic is the assumption that there would have been no car sales at all, or almost none, had the stimulus not been in place, which seems to be the thinking of many promoting this expenditure. The 20% delta caused by the stimulus seems to be a reasonable figure; people would have bought cars anyway, and the number swayed to move purchases up or to make impulse purchases simply isn’t going to be that great for a major buy like an automobile.