Remember "cash for clunkers"?  It's baaack.

Sen. Chuck Schumer has a new proposal to have everyone turn in his car and get in return a supposedly clean, green, nifty electric vehicle. 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Senator Chuck Schumer, the top Senate Democrat, late on Thursday proposed a $454 billion plan over 10 years to help shift the United States away from gasoline-powered vehicles by offering cash vouchers to help Americans buy cleaner vehicles.

Schumer said in a statement that his plan, which would provide rebates of $3,000 or more to individual buyers, would help transition 25% of the U.S. fleet, or 63 million vehicles, away from traditional internal combustion-engine vehicles within 10 years.

The plan would be key to reducing the impact of climate change, Schumer said, noting that the transportation sector accounts for nearly one-third of U.S. carbon output.

Now, pay no attention to the hard reality that electric cars run on electricity, and electricity requires coal to create.  Schumer's proposal amounts to either a massive subsidy to the coal industry — or else fuel shortages, the signature shortages of socialism in a "planned" economy.  And never mind that the composition of electric vehicles is far from carbon-neutral; it's farther, in fact, than gas-fueled vehicles. 

But never mind, indeed — it's full speed ahead on a cash for clunkers program all over again, this time with a $454-billion price tag, in the name of going green.

Here's the stupid thing about it: it's already been tried.  And, like all socialist central planning, picking and choosing winners over the market's wisdom, it failed miserably.

Back in the salad days of the Obama administration, the president, in the throes of big stimulus spending in 2009, wheeled out the $3-billion cash-for-clunkers program, also in the name of going green.

Here's the Fox News postmortem from 2014 about how that turned out:

WASHINGTON — The government’s "Cash for Clunkers" program — pitched as a plan to jump-start U.S. auto sales and clean up the environment by getting gas-guzzling vehicles off the road — may have been a clunker itself, according to a new economic study.

Researchers at Texas A&M, in a recently released report, measured the impact of Cash for Clunkers on sales and found the program actually decreased industry revenue by $3 billion over a nine-to-11-month period. Meanwhile, the "stimulus" also cost taxpayers $3 billion.

The Car Allowance Rebate System, commonly called Cash for Clunkers, was part of a 2009 economic stimulus program that was sold as a lifeline from the federal government to a sinking U.S. auto industry.

The program let people turn in their old cars for up to $4,500 in cash to be used toward the purchase of a more fuel-efficient alternative. Nearly 700,000 vehicles were traded in through the program.

But the Texas A&M University study, for the National Bureau of Economic Research, shows the program may have actually created a drag on the economy. While the program’s fuel-efficiency restrictions led to the purchase of more fuel-efficient cars, Americans ended up buying cheaper cars than they otherwise would have, the study found.

"Strikingly, we find that Cash for Clunkers actually reduced overall spending on new vehicles," the researchers reported, noting households "tended to purchase less expensive and smaller vehicles such as the Toyota Corolla, which was the most popular new vehicle purchased under the program."

They found buyers who participated "spent an average of $4,600 less on a new vehicle than they otherwise would have."

Ah, the unintended consequences, a signature feature of socialist central planning.

And now we have Chuckie Schumer proposing that we do the same thing over and over again...and expecting a different result.  File under insanity.

It does bring up an important thing about these Democrats and their crazy big-dollar economy-killing proposals: they've already been tried here, and found wanting.

Democrats in fact do this a lot.  The current crop of presidential candidates are all yelling about the importance of "taxing the rich."  Elizabeth Warren goes to great pains to say she wants only 2%.  That, too, was tried under the Obama administration — and brought us the slowest U.S. economic recovery in the history of the country.

Stimulus for infrastructure, another Democratic candidate hobbyhorse, has also been tried and found wanting.  Remember all those "shovel-ready jobs" that somehow didn't happen?  They're proposing it again.

Green schemes are a big deal now — and they certainly were under the Obama administration, too.  Remember Solyndra?  The only green in that one was money for cronies.  The real going green came from the oil and gas industry — through its pursuit of fracking.  As an added bonus, energy independence and the crushing of petro-tyrants came with it.  Based on fracking, U.S. carbon emissions fell below U.S. targets, quite unlike the eurotrash states that scrapped their nuclear power, made deals with Vladimir Putin to ensure their energy dependency and went to windmills and solar instead. The U.S. is the only one that made its Paris accord targets, most if not all of the rest of the pretty well failed. Yet sure enough, the Democrats are yelling for more of it.

It's all stuff that's been tried before and why the voters went for President Trump. Now they're proposing it again as if nothing ever happened. To heck with this — this is a party of old dead cats, well out of ideas.