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Obama Seeks Final Death Blow to Auto Industry

President Obama is trotting out yet another policy aimed at forcing American’s to change our ways and embrace the green.  Just a few weeks ago, the administration floated the idea of adding yet more taxes to our already overtaxed cars to serve the dual purpose of shoring up revenues as well as curbing driving habits (which one would assume can’t both be accomplished simultaneously, but I digress).

He also famously demanded more green to come out of Chrysler during the bailouts.  Not green as in cash of course, rather green in the environmental whacko dream of tiny cars devoid of style and features.  Luckily for the American taxpayer, Chrysler realized how bad for business this would be and promptly ignored the demands of the green police in favor of gas guzzling SUV’s which have helped put the company in a position to pay back government loans.

But now President Obama is embarking on something long promised to his environmental base in the hopes that he can change our habits so he can keep his campaign promise of slowing the rising oceans and healing the Earth.

Via Jazz Shaw at Hot Air:

[T]he Obama administration’s Department of Transportation (DOT) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are quietly moving to make another round of changes to CAFE standards. (That’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy, for those keeping score at home.) The changes would affect model years from 2017 to 2025.

Remember: The important thing is that we are saved from the scourge of Man-Made Global Warming™, not worrying about silly things like jobs and the economy!  In fact, as Shaw points out, worrying about jobs and the economy is documented to not be the concern here as shown by the U.S. government’s own report on the impact of increased CAFE standards:

The cases estimate a demand response for new vehicle sales as a result of changes in average new vehicle price by employing a price elasticity of demand of -1. While this measure attempts to quantify the potential impact of the increase in vehicle price on sales, it is not intended to be inclusive of all the potential factors that could affect new vehicle purchase decisions made by consumers. As a result of higher vehicle prices, total new LDV sales in 2025 are 8 percent lower in the CAFE3 case and 14 percent lower in the CAFE6 case than in the Reference case.

I suppose the President is finally showing some electoral foresight as these standards wouldn’t be enacted until after he’s on his post presidency book tour, but if there was ever any doubt that Obama is willing to usher in the green age on the shattered remains of what used to be the U.S. economy, one need look no further than the automobile industry for confirmation.

COMMENTS

  • YnotNOW

    in that they force inefficient behavior and make us all poorer.
    In fact, they could be considered worse, since they take away our choice to act as we would like – forcing us to buy his overpriced green cars for example.

    Can we instead madate that this president LEAVE US ALONE ??!!

    • Next93

      In just a little over eighteen months

    • allen081644

      Barack Hussein Obama…leave us thefuck alone!!!!!!!!!! You are a pain in ourass.
      a

    • thx1138v2

      Extortion: The act of obtaining money or some other thing of value from another by coercion, intimidation, violence, or the misuse of influence or authority.

  • jeffstag

    “This will build on the success of the first phase of the national program covering cars from model years 2012-2016. ”

    Well, as least we’re already having a good 2016

    • jeffstag

      is from the linked NHTSA report, if that matters

  • bobojake

    Nov 2012 can not come one day to soon to throw obama and his policies out of the Whitehouse and his obamacrats with him. Your behavior obama has to change because we don’t accept it and we detest it.

  • http://www.skiloveland.com skicougar

    I bought my jeep from a little old lady in jacksonville just with everything Obama hates in mind.

    An SUV that burns gas, gets bad mileage, cannot be tracked by satellite hook ups into the car’s computer and i live in Texas, so I have a concealed handgun license.

    With that little old lady putting less than 3,000 miles per year; while Obama is watching and taxing everything rolling off the assembly line; i’ll be driving in the passing lane of all of it for years and years.

    • acat

      OnStar is one.
      Obama is another.
      The UAW is a third.

      My Camry doesn’t burn gas like your Jeep, but it’s got most of the same benefits. I’ll wave if I see a Jeep with Texas tags zooming past me.

      Mew

      • http://www4.webng.com/rickbull/lostlucky/ rickbull

        and I will never own another. Sold the last one in 1988. They can have my Toyota Tacoma when they pry my cold dead fingers off the steering wheel. And yes, I have my load of rocks in the back.

        • acat

          A Chevy, a Buick, and an Oldsmobile, in no particular order.

          None were exceptional. None had OnStar or Obama either… and at the time the Toyotas sold here were mostly not built here.

          Mew

      • http://www.examiner.com/x-1597-Charlotte-Law--Politics-Examiner Mike gamecock DeVine

        my Granddad was a mechanic for the Chevy dealership and had many Chevys and other GM products over the years. But I will not buy one for the reasons you cite and more.

  • awake

    Better fuel economy means a lighter weight car. A lighter weight car means lighter weight and flimsy materials; materials not meant to make a crash survivable. Get it? Is this supposed to be Obamas way of appeasing the zero population people? Isn’t Holdren in that group?

    • davesinsanantonio

      cost them less in Obummercare dollars. That’s what they view as being efficiently green!

  • izoneguy

    Peruse Chevrolet’s February sales release, and you’ll notice one number that’s blatantly missing: the number of Chevy Volts sold. The number ? a very modest 281 ? is available in the company’s detailed data (PDF), but it certainly isn’t something that GM wants to highlight, apparently. Keeping the number quiet is a bit understandable, since it’s lower than the 321 that Chevy sold in January.

    Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/2011/03/auto-blog-sales-chevy-volt-plummet-only-281-sold-last-month#ixzz1NycPGUz9

    Hardest hit? Obama Merchandise Sales

    As Obama’s popularity drops, so do sales of his merchandise

    A life-size poster of a smiling Obama used to bring people up to the store to take their picture with the “president,” and often lead them to buy a little piece of the Obama moment to take home, Cherkaoui said. Then customers started making derisive comments about the president, and the Obama that once brought in business is now stowed away in the storage room.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/11/AR2010091104540.html

    • carolina
    • http://impudent.edublogs.org/ kyle8
    • gekster

      I have been getting a blank page for about 2 hours,, and now a denial of service.

      The headline:
      CLAIM: Dealerships scam tax credits by taking Chevy Volts…

      Any one got anything?

      • gekster

        from:
        http://nlpc.org/stories/2011/04/25/taxpayer-rip-dealerships-taking-chevy-volt-tax-credit
        excerpt:
        { } “Many Volts with practically no miles on them are being sold as “used” vehicles, enabling the dealerships to benefit from the $7,500 credit supplied by the American taxpayers on each car. The process of titling the Volts technically makes the dealerships the first owners of the vehicles, which gives them the ability to claim the subsidies. The cars are then offered to retail customers as “used” vehicles”.

        • acat

          The law of unintended consequences strikes again.

          Mew

          • izoneguy

            If the dealers are taking the tax credit, who would buy a Volt?

          • Flagstaff

            another who seems enthusiastically confused, two clueless blondes, (one of whom hates capitalism but loves Obama) and one guy to introduce them, to explain a simple exchange of money, automobiles, and tax subsidies?

            Couldn’t Eric have just reported the story and done a better job of telling it?

            All-in-all, a typically murky story from Fox.

          • izoneguy

            Every show has time it needs to kill until the next commercial.

            The dealers are making more from the tax credit then the lousy profit they make from selling the darn car. I thought Marxist’s did not like profit anyway?
            Regardless, GM & Obama are still ripping off the taxpayers.

          • Flagstaff

            Buy Ford.

            But honestly, this story was not about GM doing anything, it was about dealers buying up Volts to collect the tax credit, then trying to sell them used at new sticker price sans rebate, and the “stupid” tax rebate law that facilitates it.

            That’s what I meant by murky–after the simple story was told, the five people were still correcting each other.

            The less simple story is that none of it makes sense unless both dealers thought they would benefit by it, which suggests to me that there is one heck of a markup on the dam things, rather than a low markup dependent on the tax credit to create the profit.

            I’ll give you another great “dumb” example. About eleven years ago, Arizona was giving such big tax rebates/credits to gasoline/natural gas vehicles that it didn’t make sense to NOT buy one. Many people who wanted to do it were unable to, because demand was about ten times bigger than anticipated, and the pool of money to pay from was gone very quickly.

          • ag8tor

            if it meant a tax credit for ME!

  • rbdwiggins

    I assume that refers to Chrysler?s fake auto bailout pay back.

    American taxpayers have already spent more than $13 billion bailing out Chrysler. The Obama administration already forgave more than $4 billion of that debt when the company filed for bankruptcy in 2009. Taxpayers are never getting that money back. But how is Chrysler now paying off the rest of the $7.6 billion they owe the Treasury Department?

    The Obama administration?s bailout agreement with Fiat gave the Italian car company a ?Incremental Call Option? that allows it to buy up to 16% of Chrysler stock at a reduced price. But in order to exercise the option, Fiat had to first pay back at least $3.5 billion of its loan to the Treasury Department. But Fiat was having trouble getting private banks to lend it the money. Enter Obama Energy Secretary Steven Chu who has signaled that he will approve a fuel-efficient vehicle loan to Chrysler for ? wait for it ? $3.5 billion.

    Now, technically the DOE loan program is supposed to be used for specific, qualifying retooling projects, so Fiat can?t literally take the DOE money and use it to pay back the government loans. But freeing up $3.5b in capital that would otherwise be spent on retooling with low-cost loans will make it infinitely easier for Chrysler to secure the $3.5b in debt refinancing it needs. And, in light of the GAO?s pointed criticisms of the DOE loan program?s fairness and transparency, it?s hard to overlook the coincidental nature of Chrysler?s need for $3.5b and the government?s allocation of extra funds to apparently guarantee a low cost loan to Chrysler for precisely the same amount. After all, we?ve seen this movie before…

    So, to recap, the Obama Energy Department is loaning a foreign car company $3.5 billion so that it can pay the Treasury Department $7.6 billion even though American taxpayers spent $13 billion to save an American car company that is currently only worth $5 billion.

    Smells just like Government Motor’s fake auto bailout pay back, and I expected no less consistency from the Obama Administration regarding Chrysler.

    • gekster

      taking a bucket of water out of the deep end of the pool and putting it in the shalow end.
      I’ll lend myself some money so I can pay myself back.
      And liberals can’t understand that.

      • rbdwiggins

        It’s the same money laundering scheme they’ve used for decades, and the US taxpayer has always financed the con and inherited the debt. SOP.

        It’s why we are where we are…

  • 6eorge Jetson
  • drfredc

    More dead drivers than US soldiers in Iraq — that’s what some estimates of the previous CAFE crapola cost the US population. It’s any guess what this next CAFE standard is going to cost in lives…

    The reality is markets would figure this sort of stuff out just fine if left alone. Gas prices go up, small cars and alternative fuel become in vogue, No need to hurry the process… Free up the markets for energy and vehicle MPGs will find an appropriate level with minimal market disruptions…

    • davesinsanantonio

      to busybody into everyone else’s life.
      For liberals the motto is: If it ain’t broke, fix it till it is!
      Liberals would rather be wrong than do nothing. It is the need to meddle in other people’s business that drives them. After all, how will those others know how perfect you are unless you force them to do things your way?
      Since the Left have undying faith in their own infallibility, they do not understand the Law of Unintended Consequences. Since they have not really grown up enough yet to understand the real world they believe there should be no unintended consequences, only the righteous results of their own faith in their “good” intentions. They don’t really care who they actually hurt as long as their intentions are “pure”. And, since we are not “true believers” we have no right to judge them or their actions, only to become “true believers” ourselves or suffer!
      What sorry useless individuals they are. More to be scorned than pitied!!!

  • ihateliberals

    and killing jobs and the economy are all part of the same plan. You have to realize tht the true environmental whako’s believe that the United States and People themselves are what is destroying the Earth. So the fewer people there are and the less they work and create waste the better off the Earth is. I have even heard a Whacko say that to save the Earth we should eradicate Humans. These people are mentally sick but they have hypnotized a large population to ignore geological and meteorological history that shows these changes are cyclic and have People sucked into their world. One things about these whacko’s is evident through Al Gore’s life style is tht the Whacko’s are the ones that should have but everyone else should do as he says.