Would you spend $12,500 for a hearing aid? I hope not. Yet in the Biden administration's latest stimulus plan, they were counting on the fact that centrist Democrats and Republicans would want so badly to include hearing aids in Medicare that they'd give giant subsidies to electric car companies and the wealthy Democrats who buy them.
It hasn't worked out that way, and can't, until at least January. The reason for yet another misstep is likely because the president. so old he is too old to be a Baby Boomer, is obsessed with Big Government projects that worked when he was young. When he was young, the government funded the Manhattan Project, which really set off the Atomic Age. In 1969, after POTUS had committed his first known act of plagiarism but before he had run for New Castle County Council, he saw a literal Moonshot on TV.
These things stuck with him but he seems to have gotten the correlation arrows backwards. The government did not create those breakthroughs, they put up money and got out of the way. They did not subsidize 1940s computers to get a capsule to Luna, they created a spec and the private sector created new technologies to meet it. Yet we are subsidizing 1990s solar panels and batteries and expecting 21st century innovation.
Over 80 percent of energy is still produced by fossil fuels, despite over a trillion dollars in subsidies for solar and wind. So buying an electric car, which is overwhelmingly going to be powered by fossil fuels because solar and wind cannot and will not work in the old form that we all are forced to subsidize and mandate, is a waste of our money. We're stuck with old batteries that can't be recycled (government solution: mandate and subsidize the current recycling that doesn't work anyway) and cost a fortune. The only thing that has improved is software which, you guessed it, was not subsidized and mandated by government. It was optimized solely to outsell other electric cars and get fat subsidies from poor people who won't even own the cars.
In what just world do poor people in Compton pay fees to subsidize million-dollar solar installations in Malibu or Teslas? Yet that is what the new Build Back America plan offered. No wonder so many centrist Democrats are angry at Biden.
Pointless government regulations that have not helped the climate one bit have now pushed new cars into the $40,000 range - double the US poverty level. And yet we are told that the air is no cleaner than 40 years ago, because air activists have defined quality down. Instead of smog and ozone, they have pivoted to PM2.5, which you can't even see unless it is lumped in real haze from wildfires. What does the higher cost really accomplish? It keeps older cars on the road with lower fuel efficiency and the higher emissions that the demographic who think organic food is more nutritious believe is being offset because electricity is magically appearing in an outlet.
It's not science, it is plain old bad economics, and it is being pushed off on the poor. Removing the Trump era cap on deductions (because Trump!) is clear payola for four wealthy Democratic states. They are the ones getting 50% of the benefit but people in the other 46 states have to pay higher taxes to make up that difference. Which is what will happen in all of the other fees, taxes, and regulations that will get added on to utility and gas pump bills.
Everyone cares about the climate, everyone cares about public health, but nothing in this latest round of Moonshot and Manhattan Project fetishism helps either of those things. POTUS should let his new subsidies and penalties on cars be stripped and give poor people hearing aids in a separate bill. Give people a child tax credit. Don't tell the poor that in order to get either, rich people have to get a Tesla.
Science Is Not A Moonshot Or A Manhattan Project And Government Should Stop Using That Rhetoric
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