Is Cash for Clunkers Stimulating our Economy? Or Bottlenecking Retail?

I live in Florida, where we just survived our bout with Obama's Transfer of wealth program called "Cash for Clunkers II, the Appliance Sequel". What a bust! If anything it hobbled the retailers. Working in the appliance retail industry, myself, I saw firsthand, how the Cash for clunker program suppressed sales in the days leading up the event people weren't going to buy if they could get a better deal later on, unless they had to); Then created a dam bursting effect during the two days that funding lasted. This was followed by a lull in purchases, afterwards due to out of stock situations at the Vendor level. At my store we saw an 18.5% loss in business up to the day prior the onset of "Cash for Clunkers", add in the next two days and we ended up with a 1% loss in sales over the previous year. You might say "well it was an increase so it must have worked!" This is what Democrats live for, the numbers do not lie they say, but, they do mislead. For example; In November of 2009 we ran a 20% increase in sales over the previous year (even with 2009 being a recession year) in December (the month the Cash for Clunkers program leaked out) we had an 20% loss in sales, In January we had a 16% loss of sales (as more people found out), February followed with a 25% loss, March showed a 21% loss, and the first part of April (the 1st through 15th the days prior to the Cash for Clunkers event) showed an 8% loss in sales. Now when you figure in the time frame from 12/01/2009 till 05/01/2010 and bounce it against the same time period 1 year ago you will see a 1% loss in sales. NO GROWTH! The Stimulus was a bust, at least in our store (makes you wonder how those numbers work throughout the state and the states which have already had their events, also what will be the effect in those states with upcoming events?). and when you look at the sales gain in November before the cash for clunkers info was released a 1% sales loss could have actually been as much as a 19% sales gain over the December/April time frame (had the trends continued on). This demonstrates that the government in order to increase sales actually created a bottleneck in the sales process, where the only sales being made were for products that did not qualify (Ranges, dryers, and microwaves; sales of which were also depressed because of people not understanding how the program worked) or for those products the consumer could not do without when their old unit failed (even then I personally sold inexpensive non energy star rated refrigerators that will make due until the event took place and will be relocated to the garage to serve as a beer frigs after their big fancy E-Star frig shows up). Then during the event, consumers found dwindling supplies that ran out or were backordered past the "have to have" date (May 10th which was recently extended to May 31st well after the event was over and that info is too late for consumers to take advantage of). Another matter is who paid for all of this? You and I did! That’s right, even if you didn’t purchase an appliance; you did $17,600,000 (in Florida alone) worth of appliances, since it was your tax dollars that funded the program. Now let me explain something more, this stimulus didn’t really help the lower or middle classes, not truly. There were those who were able to take advantage of the savings, but, for the most part the Upper Middle and Upper class were the major benefactors in this program. Just think the Lower class gets out of paying taxes, or even gets larger tax returns than their withholdings, and the Upper class has more write offs on their taxes, so what this did was transfer wealth from the middle class (who pays more taxes) to those who didn’t need it in the first place. There you have it a program designed to stimulate growth ended up retarding growth, increased the tax deficit, moved a lot of money around (and how much did the administration of that cost?) benefitted the wealthy, and finally make Obama and his Democrat cronies look like they did something good for the country… Talk about your smoke and mirrors!