The Right And The Clunkers, Ctd

Conor thinks I was too easy to support the cash-for-clunkers program:

Just because the right includes a lot of people making very bad arguments right now doesn’t make the people they’re arguing against right. It’s a lesson I learned when I saw the behavior of bombastic, juvenile folks on the left translate into support for President Bush’s bid to invade Iraq.

He then points to several "serious arguments" against the program, including Radley Balko's:

You mean the government is offering people free money . . . and they’re taking it? And they’re measuring the program’s success by how many people . . . are willing to take free money? Shocker that it’s been so successful, huh? [...T]he government’s energy savings equation looks something like this:

(all of the energy that went into making the old car) + (the energy it will take to destroy it) + (all of the energy it took to make the new car) + ($3,500) < an extra four miles per gallon!

But the point was more narrowly tailored - to stimulate new car buying at a time when the auto industry is on life-support. It seems to me that by that criterion, it worked.