Electric car fiasco

Did the Obama administration delay report on Volt fires?

See the article for the depressing story.

But it's not just electric cars.  Obama's entire subsidy push for green energy is a massively expensive and wasteful disaster from beginning to end.  It's government overreach of the worst kind, with entirely predictable results. New energy technologies will enter the marketplace, the great majority will fail, but some of them will eventually succeed.  But none of that happens, or ever will happen, the way Obama thinks, no matter how much borrowed money he flushes down the toilet trying to have government create or pick winners.  His approach will only succeed in crippling the development of green energy technologies, or keep it from occurring at all.

His Cash-for-Clunkers debacle showed he knew nothing about how markets work, and he hasn't learned a thing since. Obama seems like a bright enough guy, but at some point a refusal to learn from experience begins to suggest otherwise.

GM has been touting its production numbers on the Volt, but that's not the same as sales which, even with big taxpayer subsidies to artificially knock down the price, are very poor. What GM has been doing is pumping its supply pipeline full of unsold vehicles. Pretty soon, there won't be room for any more, and then what?

Obama's instinct, of course, will be to double down -- to further increase the government subsidy to entice more buyers.  That will further distort the market by making the Volt competitive with superior alternatives, which therefore will fail or won't get developed at all. Technological development squeezed out by the dead hand of government: It's exactly how the Soviets ended up with tractors and consumer products that were fifty years behind the times.

Watching Obama operate around markets is like watching a retarded child play with matches around a gas can:  He's worse than clueless, because every action that has predictably bad consequences seems to him like a really great idea.

Byron