Cash for Clunkers Disaster

Instead of following the motto Reduce Reuse Recycle...seems like the government is teaching us to skip the first two parts and just go straight to recycle. The new cash for clunkers program promotes consumerism w/out promoting the most important "REDUCE our USE." It also skips over another important part, "REUSING". All the cars that are traded in are immediately destroyed. They are turned into rubble, the parts that can be recycled (steel, copper, etc) are being doing so, but there is the "unsuable" parts that are going straight to the landfills.
I feel this is a huge injustice. We are not teaching valuable lessons here. We should be teaching our society to reduce it's over need to buy buy buy. We should also be teaching our society to reuse, reuse, reuse, until the vehicle is just not worth it anymore. Even an fuel inefficient car is better than a landfill car. We need to come up with ideas of how to make fuel inefficient cars, efficient instead of trashing them. It makes me sad to see a '57 Chevey driving around and then think..you rarely see a car from the 70's, 80's or 90's being still driven. They are "worthless"for many reasons unnecessary reasons. What happened in the 60's/70's that made us stop driving cars to their final end. ???
I've rambled enough. Cash for Clunkers only promotes consumerism, which is what got us into this huge mess in the first place. We can't keep spending spending spending.. especially on an item like cars, that produces so much waste and so much resource destruction. If we want to promote consumerism, why not do it for something good like solar, wind power, or organic foods.