This summer was a time of great activity for many of us, and I’m sure plenty of my fellow students had a fantastic time hanging out at the beach or touring the world.

At the same time, I’m sure a great many others were stuck working or taking the oh-so-exciting summer classes OU offers.

But, no matter what you were doing, I am sure at some point you heard about the Cash for Clunkers program.

Heck, I bet a couple of you even traded in your old gas guzzlers for some new and more efficient compact cars.

And I don’t blame you!

The program offered up to $4,500 in rebates to those who traded in their old cars.

But, while the program has been widely considered a success by the mainstream media, no one seems to be looking at the program’s many problems or the multitude of harmful effects it’s currently having and will continue to have in the future.

When the program was first instituted, it was given a woefully inadequate budget of $1 billion, which, according to the Associated Press, was used up in just a couple of weeks.

On top of the insufficient budget, the program had an insufficient staff.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the government organization picked to run Cash for Clunkers, only 30 employees and 200 contractors were set aside to work on the project.

These men and women were swamped with work from the very beginning.

In addition to all this, the program, like many government sponsored programs, was riddled with overwhelming bureaucracy and red tape.

In many places in America, people who purchased a new car have not even been able to take it home with them yet, as the dealers are refusing to hand over the car until the government reimburses them for the rebate, something that may not happen for many months if the program continues down its current sloppy path.

Let’s shift from the producer to the consumer. A plethora of people took advantage of the Cash for Clunkers program and used the opportunity to make a little extra money on their trade-in. Many of these car buyers, however, had planned on buying a car in the future anyway.

Thus this future sale is traded in for an immediate sale, so while we have increased current auto sales, we, in turn, have also decreased future auto sales.

On top of this, consumers will now have to worry about higher used car prices due to a reduction in large car manufacturing and supply.

This will not only hurt the market, but become a burden on lower income families.

Do you know what the most purchased vehicle is under the program so far?

According to Edmunds, a popular auto trading Web site, it is the Ford Escape.

For any of you not familiar with automobiles, that is not even a car, but an SUV.

The third most purchased vehicle? The Jeep Patriot, another SUV.

I would have to say that, although the program has helped some Americans downgrade from their old economy vans to SUVs, which might be a small step in the right direction, it is by no means a cost effective way of saving the environment.

Cash for Clunkers is just another instance of the government meddling in areas where it has no business meddling and wasting taxpayers’ money on a fool’s errand.

It was a program doomed from the start and, even though this program has come to a close, many like it are sure to follow unless our government learns that, while Cash for Clunkers may have been a sound political move, as an economic plan, it utterly failed.

In the world of economics there is no such thing as a free lunch, and the sooner the national government realizes this, the better.