So when Chrysler can’t get their sinks to stop dripping, they call Joe the Plumber. When Chrysler can’t fund the required RDT&E effort needed to meet new EPA fuel economy standards, they call….Joe the Plumber.
They don’t call Joe the Plumber directly, but they do call the people who have a Hoover-Vac permanently attached to Joe the Plumber’s wallet. They call Congress and Congress spreads the wealth – Joe’s wealth. According to the Planet Gore Blog on NRO, the shakedown has only begun.
Last year, Washington passed legislation requiring the U.S. auto fleet to meet an average 35-mpg fuel-economy goal by 2020, a mandate designed to reduce greenhouse emissions that is utterly divorced from whatever consumer market tastes might be. Employing an army of lobbyists, the Big Three protested a regulatory burden estimated to cost a staggering $85 billion over ten years. When their protests fell on deaf ears, automakers then demanded that the feds pony up $25 billion to help retool American factories to produce the fuel-efficient cars Washington requires.
But surely, this was just a one-off. Like the bailout of Lee Iacocca, in the recent past, this sort of governmental interference in the free market would never occur again. A cynic would answer “that depends.”
“Depends upon what?” Thrasymachus may inquire.
Well it could, very well, depend upon who wins this Fall and how many Democrats take the oath of office in the US Senate. Details of their planned largesse are not pretty. Again, Planet Gore reminds us of what is already on the table in the form of campaign rhetoric.
Barack Obama has promised an additional $150 billion over ten years to help other industries with the transition costs to a greener future.
That deficit clock over on the Financial Armageddon blog may need a fix similar to the Y2K bug. It might need room for a couple of more zeroes.
And yet that is not all this mordant turn of the statist screw entails. We now have a global economic arms race for who can subsidize their national industries most rapidly at taxpayer expense. The EU has been at this game longer than Barrack Obama. They were subverting private enterprise back when Barack Obama was living off food stamps at Hawaii’s most prestigious private college prep academy. The Wall Street Journal describes the European efforts at one-upmanship.
European taxpayers already have a meaty hunk of bank bailouts to swallow. Now they're getting something green on their plates as well.
Just weeks after EU lawmakers passed strict new carbon-emission regulations despite warnings that they would cost auto makers dearly, Brussels called Wednesday for €40 billion in loans to the industry so that it can comply with the new rules. The EU taketh away, the EU giveth.
Ah, but they have an excuse already handy. One that US voters still eagerly awaiting those middle class tax cuts Bill Clinton promised in 1992 are already used to hearing. The European Parliament regretfully informs us that Porsche and VW are no longer the Porsche and VW that they used to know….
Brussels describes the loans from the European Investment Bank as being necessitated by the financial crisis. The looming recession will no doubt hurt auto sales in Europe, which fell further than expected during the third quarter.
Of course, the EU had to have known that they were raising the barriers to success in the auto industry; directly into the teeth of a recession. Just as Barack Obama knows full good and well that Ford Motor Company has long been losing money faster than the rise of the tides in The Bay of Fundy.
These government leaders, both in the US and in Europe, are dishonest. That’s if you subscribe to the optimistic scenario. On the other hand, they really may know less about economics than Pvt. Gomer Pyle. This could be the only way they could tell us with a straight face that business will pay the price to combat global warming.
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