I don’t want a Chevy Volt. So why do I have to pay for someone else’s Chevy Volt?
Chevy Volt Costing Taxpayers Up to $250K Per Vehicle
Analyst: ‘This might be the most government-supported car since the Trabant’
Each Chevy Volt sold thus far may have as much as $250,000 in state and federal dollars in incentives behind it – a total of $3 billion altogether, according to an analysis by James Hohman, assistant director of fiscal policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.
Hohman looked at total state and federal assistance offered for the development and production of the Chevy Volt, General Motors’ plug-in hybrid electric vehicle. His analysis included 18 government deals that included loans, rebates, grants and tax credits. The amount of government assistance does not include the fact that General Motors is currently 26 percent owned by the federal government.
Read it all. And barf.
The whole deal seems a bit steep for a car no one seems to want. And I worry that if the government is making us pay for them, pretty soon they might want to make us buy them. The same way that making us pay for public transportation leads them to try to make us ride it.
I am sick and tired of people who know what’s best for everyone else. They make me want to retaliate by deciding what’s best for them.
How many volts does it take to… Oh never mind!
MORE: Looking at all the problems with the Volt, Reason’s A. Barton Hinkle compares the Obama keystone to a Carter keystone:
Electric cars one day may take their place alongside the Internet as one of the great life-changing innovations of our time. But right now it looks as though they will join what Jimmy Carter called the “keystone” of his energy policy, the Synthetic Fuels Corporation, in the rogues’ gallery of gawdawful government flops.
In short, then, the president is using political power to reallocate economic resources to make people adopt an inferior technology that nobody wants. So much for his stellar performance as captain of the economy.
But Obama is less concerned with what the public wants than what he thinks is best for it. This is modern liberalism’s chief project: empowering a cognitive elite to correct what it sees as the poor choices of the stupid, venal masses. (Energy Secretary Steven Chu neatly summarized this approach when he argued for new lightbulb standards by saying, “We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money.”) And the president is more cognitively elite than most. Or at least he thinks he is, referring sometimes to “teachable moments,” i.e., occasions for people to be given the gift of his enlightenment.
Teach back in November!