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Electric Car Subsidies As Handouts For the Rich
Atypical Geek writes "Charles Lane, writing for Slate, argues that subsidies for electric cars are an example of 'limousine liberalism' — a lavish gift for well-off Americans to buy expensive cars for the sake of appearing green. From the article: 'How rarefied is the electric-car demographic? When Deloitte Consulting interviewed industry experts and 2,000 potential buyers, it found that from now until 2020, only "young, very high income individuals" — from households making more than $200,000 a year — would even be interested in plug-in hybrids or all-electric cars.'
Lane also takes issue with the billions of dollars in subsidies offered to automakers for the manufacture of batteries, arguing that research (warning, PDF) concludes that the money will not help in jump-starting the economies of scale that will drive down prices. At least, not as much or as quickly as the President has argued."
Rebates are stupid. It's the most regressive tax spending possible. If I can afford a large portion of something, I get the rest for free? If I can't afford that much, I get nothing? Um, something is wrong here.
If the government wants to encourage electric cars, why doesn't it buy them? Switch the entire damn postal service over to start with. Give grants for local comunity to switch their police cars and mass transit over.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
My first CD writer cost $45,000(!) and came in a rack with its own PC - and the blank disks were $60 each when bought in quantities of at least 100. Clearly this isn't going to catch on.
My first home network connection was a 110 baud acoustic coupler that cost $250. 6 months later I upgraded to a 300 baud modem that cost the same amount. It takes an hour to download a 10KB file from my local BBS. And they call this an improvement?
My first Windows mouse cost $220 including the board that you needed to run it in a PC. Damn, this will NEVER, EVER catch on.
And that double speed NEC CD reader that I bought for $450 was a real bargain.
Oh, and I remember when RAM switched from core to semiconductor memory, and the price came down to a million bucks per megabyte. We thought we were in heaven when our company bought 3 systems with 2 megabytes each.
I can come up with many, many more examples of costs that have dropped incredibly over time. I don't know if electric cars are in that category, but I think there's an excellent chance that they are.
Money spent on R & D is not money wasted. Yes, you have to be certain that there's a real chance of success, but if you wait until that chance is 100% then someone else will have already done it.