Volt

Chevy Volt: The Car From Atlas Shrugged Motors
Patrick Michaels, 03.16.11, 6:00 PM ET

The Chevrolet Volt is beginning to look like it was manufactured by Atlas Shrugged Motors, where the government mandates everything politically correct, rewards its cronies and produces junk steel.

This is the car that subsidies built. General Motors lobbied for a $7,500 tax refund for all buyers, under the shaky (if not false) promise that it was producing the first all-electric mass-production vehicle.

At least that's what we were once told. Sitting in a Volt that would not start at the 2010 Detroit Auto Show, a GM engineer swore to me that the internal combustion engine in the machine only served as a generator, kicking in when the overnight-charged lithium-ion batteries began to run down. GM has continually revised downward its estimates of how far the machine would go before the gas engine fired, and now says 25 to 50 miles.

It turns out that the premium-fuel fired engine does drive the wheels--when the battery is very low or when the vehicle is at most freeway speeds. So the Volt really isn't a pure electric car after all. I'm sure that the people who designed the car knew how it ran, and so did their managers.

Why then the need to keep this so quiet? It's doubtful that GM would have gotten such a subsidy if it had been revealed that the car would do much of its freeway cruising with a gas engine powering the wheels. While the Volt is more complicated than the Prius, and has a longer battery-only range, a hybrid is a hybrid, and the Prius no longer qualifies for a tax credit.

In other words, GM was desperate for customers for what they perceived would be an unpopular vehicle before one even hit the road. It had hoped to lure more if buyers subtracted the $7,500 from the $41,000 sticker price. Instead, as Consumer Reports found out, the car was very pricey. The version they tested cost $43,700 plus a $5,000 dealer markup ("Don't worry," I can hear the salesperson saying, "you'll get more than that back in your tax credit!"), or a whopping $48,700 minus the credit.

This is one reason that Volt sales are anemic: 326 in December, 321 in January, and 281 in February. GM announced a production run of 100,000 in the first two years. Who is going to buy all these cars?

Another reason they aren't exactly flying off the lots is because, well, they have some problems. In a telling attempt to preserve battery power, the heater is exceedingly weak. Consumer Reports averaged a paltry 25 miles of electric-only running, in part because it was testing in cold Connecticut. (My engineer at the Auto Show said cold weather would have little effect.)

It will be interesting to see what the range is on a hot, traffic-jammed summer day, when the air conditioner will really tax the batteries. When the gas engine came on, Consumer Reports got about 30 miles to the gallon of premium fuel; which, in terms of additional cost of high-test gas, drives the effective mileage closer to 27 mpg. A conventional Honda Accord, which seats 5 (instead of the Volt's 4), gets 34 mpg on the highway, and costs less than half of what CR paid, even with the tax break.

Recently, President Obama selected General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt to chair his Economic Advisory Board. GE is awash in windmills waiting to be subsidized so they can provide unreliable, expensive power.

Consequently, and soon after his appointment, Immelt announced that GE will buy 50,000 Volts in the next two years, or half the total produced. Assuming the corporation qualifies for the same tax credit, we (you and me) just shelled out $375,000,000 to a company to buy cars that no one else wants so that GM will not tank and produce even more cars that no one wants. And this guy is the chair of Obama's Economic Advisory Board?

It really is enough to get you to say Atlas Shrugged. For those who do not know, or who are only vaguely familiar with, the Ayn Rand classic, it is a story of a society in decay, where politically favored technologies and jobs are foisted on the nation, where innovations that might threaten existing corporatist cartels are financially or physically sabotaged as unemployment mounts and the nation spirals into a malaise that makes the Carter years look like Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.

Atlas Shrugged is about to come out as a surprisingly good and entertaining movie (which will be destroyed by Hollywood and New York Critics) on--you guessed it--April 15. Maybe the government could put in an ad before the show with Immelt exhorting Americans to care about "the environment and green jobs." All must buy Volts.

Patrick Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of Climate Coup: Global Warming's Invasion of our Government and our Lives, which comes out April 22.

George Will at CPAC Pt1

George Will at CPAC Pt2

George Will at CPAC Pt3

Questions for those who wish the US to engage abroad

I am torn on this particular issue - the US has always stood for freedom, but I fear that "standing for freedom" can often be portrayed as meddling in the affairs of others. Regardless of your view, George Will raises some interesting questions...

On Libya, too many questions

Tuesday, March 8, 2011;

In September 1941, Japan's leaders had a question for Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto: Could he cripple the U.S. fleet in Hawaii? Yes, he said. Then he had a question for the leaders: But then what?

Following an attack, he said, "I shall run wild considerably for the first six months or a year, but I have utterly no confidence" after that. Yamamoto knew America: He had attended Harvard and been naval attache in Japan's embassy in Washington. He knew Japan would be at war with an enraged industrial giant. The tide-turning defeat of Japan's navy at the Battle of Midway occurred June 7, 1942 - exactly six months after Pearl Harbor.

Today, some Washington voices are calling for U.S. force to be applied, somehow, on behalf of the people trying to overthrow Moammar Gaddafi. Some interventionists are Republicans, whose skepticism about government's abilities to achieve intended effects ends at the water's edge. All interventionists should answer some questions:

• The world would be better without Gaddafi. But is that a vital U.S. national interest? If it is, when did it become so? A month ago, no one thought it was.
• How much of Gaddafi's violence is coming from the air? Even if his aircraft are swept from his skies, would that be decisive?
• What lesson should be learned from the fact that Europe's worst atrocity since the Second World War - the massacre by Serbs of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica - occurred beneath a no-fly zone?
• Sen. John Kerry says: "The last thing we want to think about is any kind of military intervention. And I don't consider the fly zone stepping over that line." But how is imposing a no-fly zone - the use of military force to further military and political objectives - not military intervention?
• U.S. forces might ground Gaddafi's fixed-wing aircraft by destroying runways at his 13 air bases, but to keep helicopter gunships grounded would require continuing air patrols, which would require the destruction of Libya's radar and anti-aircraft installations. If collateral damage from such destruction included civilian deaths - remember those nine Afghan boys recently killed by mistake when they were gathering firewood - are we prepared for the televised pictures?
• The Economist reports Gaddafi has "a huge arsenal of Russian surface-to-air missiles" and that some experts think Libya has SAMs that could threaten U.S. or allies' aircraft. If a pilot is downed and captured, are we ready for the hostage drama?
• If we decide to give war supplies to the anti-Gaddafi fighters, how do we get them there?
• Presumably we would coordinate aid with the leaders of the anti-Gaddafi forces. Who are they?
• Libya is a tribal society. What concerning our Iraq and Afghanistan experiences justifies confidence that we understand Libyan dynamics?
• Because of what seems to have been the controlling goal of avoiding U.S. and NATO casualties, the humanitarian intervention - 79 days of bombing - against Serbia in Kosovo was conducted from 15,000 feet. This marked the intervention as a project worth killing for but not worth dying for. Would intervention in Libya be similar? Are such interventions morally dubious?
• Could intervention avoid "mission creep"? If grounding Gaddafi's aircraft is a humanitarian imperative, why isn't protecting his enemies from ground attacks?
• In Tunisia and then in Egypt, regimes were toppled by protests. Libya is convulsed not by protests but by war. Not a war of aggression, not a war with armies violating national borders and thereby implicating the basic tenets of agreed-upon elements of international law, but a civil war. How often has intervention by nation A in nation B's civil war enlarged the welfare of nation A?
• Before we intervene in Libya, do we ask the United Nations for permission? If it is refused, do we proceed anyway? If so, why ask? If we are refused permission and recede from intervention, have we not made U.S. foreign policy hostage to a hostile institution?
• Secretary of State Hilary Clinton fears Libya becoming a failed state - "a giant Somalia." Speaking of which, have we not seen a cautionary movie - "Black Hawk Down" - about how humanitarian military interventions can take nasty turns?
• The Egyptian crowds watched and learned from the Tunisian crowds. But the Libyan government watched and learned from the fate of the Tunisian and Egyptian governments. It has decided to fight. Would not U.S. intervention in Libya encourage other restive peoples to expect U.S. military assistance?
• Would it be wise for U.S. military force to be engaged simultaneously in three Muslim nations?

Dems not taking debt seriously

I especially like the blue text portion - this is a great rebuttal to the "jobs" argument...

Dems not taking debt seriously
JACOB SULLUM

jsullum@reason.com Mar 9, 2011 2:10AM

In the context of federal spending that will total something like $3.8 trillion this year, $61 billion is a rounding error. Yet the Democrats resisting that amount in House-approved cuts say it will wreck the economy while leaving children unschooled, taking food from the mouths of the elderly, and casting disabled people into the streets.

Laughter is the only appropriate response to such predictions. In these absurd times, when both parties quibble over crumbs while the layer cake of debt rises higher and higher, laughter is a mark of fiscal seriousness.

How else should one greet a New York Times editorial that concedes the federal deficit, projected to be $1.6 trillion this year, is “too large for comfort” but calls $61 billion in cuts “ruinous”? Or a press release from the Every Child Matters Education Fund that deems them “harsh” and “extreme”?

The cuts represent less than 2 percent of the total budget, less than 4 percent of the deficit, and less than 5 percent of discretionary spending, which rose in real terms by 75 percent from 2000 to 2010 and by about 9 percent in each of the last two fiscal years. If the House-approved reductions would be “the largest one-year cuts in history,” as the folks at Every Child Matters say, that is a sad commentary not on Republican cold-heartedness but on the fiscal incontinence of both parties.

This week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) highlighted that tendency. “Do we want jobs?” he asked. “If we do, then we simply cannot pass the plan the Tea Party has already pushed through the House.”

This argument got a boost last month from a projection by Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. By Zandi’s reckoning, “The House Republicans’ proposal . . . would shave almost half a percentage point from real GDP growth in 2011 and another 0.2 percentage point in 2012,” which “would mean some 400,000 fewer jobs created by the end of 2011 and 700,000 fewer jobs by the end of 2012.”

At $174,000 a year per job, that does not seem like such a good deal. But if we assume, as Reid apparently does, that money is no object, why not raise federal spending by $2.4 trillion a year, thereby creating 13.7 million jobs and eliminating unemployment altogether?

The answer, presumably, is that the resources diverted to the government’s job factory, in terms of new debt and future taxes needed to pay it off, can be better employed elsewhere, creating value instead of make-work. But in that case, we should stop worrying about the jobs “lost” when government spending is cut.

A more sophisticated version of this argument, favored by President Obama, distinguishes between wasteful government spending and “job-creating investments in education, innovation, and infrastructure.” The problem with trusting the government to invest our money is that it faces no penalty for making bad calls.

Consider education spending, which Obama treats as an unalloyed good. Between 1961-62 and 2006-07, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education, per-pupil spending in public schools more than tripled in real terms, while student achievement stagnated. This was a “job-creating investment” only in the sense that it created jobs for public school teachers.

Picking up the president’s investment theme, The New York Times says it’s “obfuscating nonsense” to declare that “we’re broke,” as House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) likes to do. “A country with a deficit is not necessarily any more ‘broke’ than a family with a mortgage or a college loan,” the Times explains.

Suppose the mortgage is twice the home’s current value, the college loan was used for an unfinished degree in anthropology, and the family cannot make payments on either without borrowing or stealing because it has no income of its own. Now this family looks more like the federal government.

Whether we call it “broke” or not, no one should be lending it any more money until it gets its house in order.