“Clean” Cars

That’s what Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) wants Government to subsidize.  He’s proposing Government spend $462 billion to pay Americans trading in our gasoline-powered cars for electric ones.  He wants to drop $17 billion on subsidies for auto manufacturers to “help” them build more electric cars along with batteries and associated parts, and $45 billion on charging stations and associated “infrastructure.”

In addition to ignoring where this money is supposed to come from, he’s also misleading on the “clean” electric car bit.  He knows, after all, where the electricity must come from to charge those batteries, whether at home or at his charging stations.

That electricity is generated by coal-, oil-, and gas-fired generating plants.  In New York, where Schumer’s fellow Progressive-Democrat Governor Andrew Cuomo has banned fracking and additional gas infrastructure, those generating plants can’t use clean gas to produce electricity for Schumer’s cars: those plants are dependent on coal and oil fuel: Schumer’s electric cars will have even larger carbon footprints.

“Clean” electric cars, indeed.

This sort of scheme also is an affront to our free market economy and an insult to ordinary Americans’ intelligence.  If electric cars were ready for market, they wouldn’t need government subsidies to be saleable.  If Americans wanted electric cars, we’d buy them in droves on our own, without needing to be bribed into buying them.

Small Increase

That’s what an oblivious press has termed Chile’s attempted 4% increase in the cost of a ride on the subway. Chile, especially its capital, Santiago, has been in an uproar over that increase for the last several days, and the protests have expanded to address “social/economic inequality” in general.

The turmoil was triggered by a small increase in metro fairs in the capital….

Here are some round numbers, used for illustration, that compare a poor man and a rich man, one needing to use the subway to get to work or to get to market to buy other necessities and the other on a strictly occasional basis (he has personal transportation).  Subway use absorbs 40% of the poor man’s income, 4% of the rich man’s. Whom do you suppose that 4% increase hits the hardest? For whom is the increase just another coin in his pocket?

There may be good reasons for the fare increase, but not understanding the situation isn’t one of them.  (I’m ignoring, too, the relative impacts of a free market economy vs a centrally directed one, and separately, who should be making the fare decisions.)

And not too tangentially (excuse the opening ad)….