I keep meaning to link to Brad Plumer's post on cars and poverty, and keep forgetting, so here's Brad Plumer's post on cars and poverty. The basic point, that not having a car is one of many things that makes it tough to lift yourself out of poverty, is a good one, and more multifaceted than you might think. Bus lines, for instance, tend to travel through poorer areas, choking off access to better-compensated, more prestigious jobs in wealthier parts of town. Cheap, used cars can send families into debt, as the initial cost, already a budgetary strain, is dwarfed by numerous smaller, yet still substantial, repair bills, bills that often dwarf those in newer cars as the parts for a '72 Cutlass aren't in wide circulation these days.
So what's the fix? There are a bunch of good loan, lend, and lease ideas out there, but here's a bit of bigger think. American car companies are flailing. This is widely recognized as a Bad Thing. What if the government awarded GM and/or Ford a contract to produce a small, cheap, fuel efficient car. We're talking a tiny, bare-bones vehicle that could be sold at very low cost or loaned out in massive ZipCar-style programs, and that'd use standardized parts that could render repairs cheap through sheer scale and uniformity.
When folks got more cash, they could buy better cars, with radios and aesthetically pleasing designs and so forth, but until then, this could be the transportation equivalent of the $100 laptop, and that's desperately necessary. You could even use the autos as incentives, with folks only keeping them so long as they held a steady job or saved X dollars or whatever. The possibilities for the Nanny State are endless! And giving the American auto industry a foothold in a market they've been edged out of would be, if not an unadulterated Good Thing, a pretty good one. Labor, too, would appreciate the renewed business for their most quickly-eroding stronghold, and protectionists, progressives, and the poor would all stand to benefit here. So it's good politics. And anyone who's read DeParle's American Dream or looked through the data on transportation budgets knows it's necessary policy.
