In the event he elected to do the minimum required to keep the cash-guzzlers on the road.
Furthermore, GM's European Opel unit, which failed to obtain a viable bidder or a bailout from the German government, remains a cash-guzzler, having lost over a billion dollars since the company emerged from bankruptcy last year.
The shrinkage of the cash-for-guzzlers program means that the issue will be taken up anew in fiscal 2010, with possible hearings convened, the Feinstein spokeswoman said.
The $1 billion cash-for-guzzlers proposal, modeled after successful programs in Germany and other European countries, is part of a $106 billion supplemental spending measure designed mostly to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The scaled-back version approved late Tuesday, inserted last week in conference between House and Senate leaders, would provide funding for less than four months, said Nichole Francis Reynolds, chief of staff for Rep. Betty Sutton, D-Ohio, who sponsored the original cash-for-guzzlers bill.
"But despite offering £1m for each aircraft (they were originally sold to BA by the British government for £1) sadly our friends at British Airways were having none of it - and decommissioned the planes in a way that makes any chance of them flying again an unlikely prospect!" Talking of money, let's scotch that myth that the great gas-guzzler did not make any cash for British Airways.
But the car has been nothing but a money-guzzler, she said, leaving her so short of cash that the car often sits in the parking lot outside her apartment.
Used as a speedway dirt track for a couple of years, it was a storage depot between 2008 and 2011 for old cars dumped during the US government's $3bn Cash for Clunkers programme – aimed at getting Americans to trade in old gas-guzzlers – before being bought by a local developer and transformed into new homes by Heartland Design architects.
The decline was a direct result of cash for clunkers, which offered incentives of up to $4,500 for people who traded gas-guzzlers for more efficient models.
This second melodramatic about-turn in the space of 12 months was of course perfect fodder for the late night shows: "My God," remarked David Letterman of CBS apropos of Favre's $25m £15mm) two-year deal with the Vikings, "talk about Cash for Clunkers" (a reference to the federal government's programme to get ancient gas-guzzlers off the road).
