More than half a million cars have been purchased in a blur of a few weeks as the Cash for Clunkers program trucked through $3 billion.

The program is being hailed as a success in terms of participation and its boost to the car industry.

But I question the impact on the economy as a whole, especially what it means for us locally.

This week, we are carrying several stories about Cash for Clunkers and how it’s worked locally. The response leaves me somewhat cold.

One car dealer is saying that this program didn’t add to his business as much as it took sales that would have come on their own in due time and piled them into a very short time period. A three-week boom — now what?

But the most troubling issue for me is how much this program will impact the power of consumers in our neck of the woods.

Dealers we’ve talked to say many of the people who are taking part in the program are financing their cars. We talked to Patricia Kummer, one of our business columnists and a financial advisor based in Highlands Ranch, about what she has seen. She’s had clients take on more debt with bad interest rates or cash in their investments just to take part in the program.

I can’t blame the folks who came up for Cash for Clunkers. They merely provided a program aimed at boosting a very specific segment of our economy, but we’re the ones who took them up on it.

Sound familiar to anyone?

Just as we start digging ourselves out of a mess fueled in large part by a bunch of people taking the bait to buy a house they couldn’t afford, more than half a million people jump at the idea of buying a new car and they jumped faster and in far greater numbers than anyone anticipated.

I get the idea that getting the economy moving means money has to start changing hands. I have no problem with that.

But spending is one thing, incurring more debt is another. The $300, $500 or $700 that these car loans are pulling out of many consumers’ pockets means there is less money going into the local economy. That’s less money keeping people employed, providing sustainable sales tax revenue for reinvestment in the community, bringing an unburdened sense of financial flexibility into the economy and so on. This is extremely important to the south metro area where small business makes up so much of the economy and where failed bond elections coupled with falling tax revenues have put the brakes on many community enhancements.

Simply put, we have to be smarter than this if the economy is really going to rebound.

Jeremy Bangs is the managing editor of Colorado Community Newspapers.