rebuttal: or who is wrong today?

Here's the full text from a July 31st letter to the editor in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press. (AKA, the one with the more conservative readers)

"Again, with dismay, I read about another government program designed to waste more of the taxpayers' money ("Pols give 'clunker' new meaning," July 21).
This program is called the Car Allowance Rebate System. CARS will pay individuals from $3,000 to $5,000 to turn in their old gas-guzzling, air-polluting junkers that are at least 8 years old and get less than 18 mpg.
With the money, the person must purchase a new car that gets at least 24 mpg. Cost of the program is a mere $4 billion to $6 billion.
However, it hasn't been figured out where the money will come from. I think most of us could get that answer in one guess.
The premise of the program is bad enough. But the real kicker is that I'm seeing ads for this program sponsored by none other than dealers for Nissan, Toyota and other imports.
Did not our leaders just spend billions upon billions to bail out U.S. carmakers? I would think that the writers of this bill would have been smart enough to give our country a little leg up and only offer the program on American-made autos.
Bruce H. Bentson, Inver Grove Heights"

The premise is twofold: stimulate consumers to buy new cars, and attempt to reduce dependence for oil. Indelicate? Sure. recycling used cars that are perfectly good is wasteful, but better that congress made it an option to trade in certain cars and had some waste, instead of mandating that having those cars would be illegal.
But lets face some facts: The truly fuel inefficient 1970s cars are a teensy portion of all cars out there. taking the cars that are both more prevalent AND not very fuel efficient gets more cars off the road, and does a greater job of reducing the total amount of fuel needed.
Fuel is one of those things with inelastic demand. so if demand goes down, you're not going to see the wild price inflations that you saw in summer of 2008. So it costs $6 billion dollars to the US taxpayers. that's $20 per person. I think that the gas savings alone would account for that.

Issue two is the "fact" that foreign automakers have been taking advantage of this.
Well, the carmakers who have had the better small cars have tended to be foreign-owned. That's not really their fault for doing their job well.
But let's look at where the most purchased cars under the CARS system are made. For the record, this is taken from Jalopnik.
1. Ford Focus (ooh. that's gotta hurt when the #1 purchased car is American. Sorry Bruce. Anyways, its made in Wayne, Michigan.)
2. Honda Civic (built in Ohio and Indiana)
3. Toyota Corolla (many built in Ontario, but there is a plant in California)
4. Toyota Prius (made in Japan)
5. Ford Escape (made in Missouri)
6. Toyota camry (made in Kentucky)
7. Dodge Caliber (made in Illinois)
8. Hyundai Elantra (made in Korea)
9. Honda Fit (made in Japan)
10. Chevy Cobalt (made in Ohio)

So 4 out of 10 are made abroad. Okay, technically three are, because there IS a corolla plant in the US. More importantly, 6 of the top 7 are made here in the US.
As they say, PWND.