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Opinion

Biden Promised To Build Half A Million EV Charging Stations. So far, There Are A Grand Total Of 8.

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By STEPHEN MOORE

 

The Biden administration has spent tens of billions of dollars on green energy and yet last year the U.S. and the world used record amounts of fossil fuels.

That would seem to be prima facie evidence that this “great transition” to renewable energy has so far been an expensive policy belly flop.

The evidence is everywhere. Americans aren’t buying EVs anymore than they were before Biden was elected. The car companies even with record federal subsidies are losing billions of dollars making EVs that people don’t want. Wind and solar still account for less than 15% of American energy, and across the country hundreds of communities are saying “not in my backyard” to ugly and spacious solar and wind farms. And of course gas prices at the pump and electric bills are 30% to 50% higher, even though we were promised that the green revolution would save us money.

A case in point is the scandalous mismanagement of how these green energy programs are being implemented.  Consider the $7.5 billion federal program stuck inside the Biden 2021 Infrastructure bill — a law that Biden touts as one of his great achievements. That bill promised half a million EV charging stations installed all over the country.

Instead, there have been a grand total of… drum roll please…”seven or eight installed.” To be fair, that was through last month. They might be up to nine now.

When Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was confronted recently on CBS’s “Face the Nation” about what happened with all the money, he hemmed and hawed and replied: “In order to do a charger, it’s more than just plunking a small device into the ground, there’s utility work, and this is also, really, a new category of federal investment.”

Uh huh! Sure. Installing an electric charger for a Tesla in your garage is very complicated business. It’s like trying to Build the Taj Mahal (which may not have cost $7.5 billion).

Here’s another mystery. Why can’t Pete give us an exact count on the progress when the number is small enough to use his fingers?  What is for sure is that at this pace they may get 500 built by 2030 — not the 500,000 promised.

Thank God our celebrated transportation secretary renowned for riding his bike to his office in Washington wasn’t in charge of the Normandy landing.

Then there is the question of where the $7.5 billion of taxpayer money has actually gone. At their current rate of production the final program’s price tag could inflate to more than $1 trillion.

If Trump were president, he’d have long ago summoned Mayor Pete to the Oval Office and greet him with those two words that made him famous: “YOU’RE FIRED.”

Instead many Democrats are quietly talking about throwing Joe Biden off the ticket and one of the front runners to take his place is none other than the highly accomplished Pete Buttigieg.

But there are some serious lessons to be learned from this monumental screw-up.

First, though Biden loves to chat up how much money the government is “investing” — where are the signs that any of these trillions of dollars of borrowed money have improved our lives. This EV charger scandal is just another reminder that the government generally doesn’t “invest” tax dollars — it mostly wastes them.

Second, competence matters. At the Committee to Unleash Prosperity we released a study finding that more than 90% of the Biden top economic and finance team has NO experience running a business. We have an energy secretary who knows nothing about energy and a transportation secretary who knows nothing about transportation. They are either lawyers, academics, politicians or government employees.

They are not bad people. They just don’t know how to run anything — and it shows.

Finally, why do we need the government to build EV charging stations? One hundred years ago the government didn’t build gas stations. They just magically sprouted up all over the roads that crisscross America because entrepreneurs responded to the demand. So two or three brothers would scrap together some cash, buy a small plot of land on I-66, build a service station with four to eight hoses connected to a tank, put up a tall sign posting the gas price and drivers would pull in and fill er up.

All of this “infrastructure” without a single penny or instruction manual from Washington.

Can you imagine if Biden had been president in the 1920s and proclaimed that the government will build 500,000 gas stations? They still wouldn’t be built and we’d all be waiting in long gas lines.

Stephen Moore is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.  

Daily Caller

Joe Rogan Tells Elon Musk He ‘Changed’ History By Buying Twitter, Calls Out Previous Government Interference

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation 

 

By Hailey Gomez

The popular podcast host thanked Musk for deciding to buy the company, noting how social media companies had coordinated with the government to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, impacting the 2020 election.

Podcast host Joe Rogan told billionaire Elon Musk on Monday that he “changed the course of history” by buying Twitter in 2022, recounting how the government had become intertwined with social media platforms.

In October 2022, Musk won a legal battle to become the sole owner of Twitter, now known as X, and promptly fired several top executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal and Vijaya Gadde, head of legal policy, trust and safety. On “The Joe Rogan Experience,” the popular podcast host thanked Musk for deciding to buy the company, noting how social media companies had coordinated with the government to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, impacting the 2020 election.

“First of all, thank you. Thank you so much for buying Twitter. Thank you so much. I’m not exaggerating when I think you changed the course of history. I really do. I really think you made a fork in the road. We were headed down a path of censorship and of control of narratives that is unprecedented,” Rogan said.

“Forget about what they were able to do back when they had newspapers and the media under control. What they were doing with social media by suppressing information and when you had a combined government effort — like with what they were doing with the laptop story,” Rogan added. “We have 51 former intelligence agents saying that this is Russian disinformation, take it off offline, and Twitter complied. If you didn’t buy that we wouldn’t have known that. We had no idea.”

Musk explained how he became aware that the system on Twitter was changing, pointing out how former President Donald Trump was permanently banned from the platform after Jan. 6, despite calling on his supporters not to riot.

WATCH:

“The reason I bought [Twitter] was because I’m pretty attuned, since I was the most interacted with users on Twitter before the acquisition,” Musk said. “So before the acquisition I had more interactions then — like there’s some accounts like [former President Barack] Obama and whatever had a higher follower count — but I had the most number of interactions of any account in the system. So I was very attuned to like if they change the system, I can tell immediately. And I’m like, something weird is going on here, you know?”

“I just got increasingly uneasy and obviously when they de-platformed a sitting president, you know, de-platformed Trump — that was just insane. The things he was posting … he was posting good things. He was saying, ‘Hey, we do not riot, but don’t do any destruction of property, please stay calm.’ That’s the kind of stuff he was posting, and you’re like, ‘Uh, what’s wrong with that?’ Then some people said, ‘Oh, that’s like some sort of dog whistle, he means the opposite.’ I’m like, ‘Okay, so we’ll give you Trump’s account. Now you post what you think he should post because you can post nothing, he can ask people to calm down, like what? It was insane, it didn’t make any sense,” Musk said.

Following Musk’s acquisition of the company, the billionaire collaborated with independent journalists and authors like Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger to release the “Twitter Files,” which revealed that the company’s former executives justified banning Trump by citing the “context surrounding” the former president and his supporters “over the course of the election and frankly last 4+ years.”

After the interview with Musk was released Monday evening, Rogan announced on X that he endorsed Trump in his bid for the White House.

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Fraser Institute

U.S. election should focus or what works and what doesn’t work

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From the Fraser Institute

By Matthew D. Mitchell

As Republicans and Democrats make their final pitch to voters, they’ve converged on some common themes. Kamala Harris wants to regulate the price of food. Donald Trump wants to regulate the price of credit. Harris wants the tax code to favour the 2.5 per cent of workers who earn tips. So does Trump. Harris wants the government to steer more labour and capital into manufacturing. And so does Trump.

With each of these proposals, the candidates think the United States would be better off if the government made more economic decisions and—by implication—if individual citizens made fewer economic decisions. Both should pay closer attention to Zimbabwe. Yes, Zimbabwe.

Why does a country with abundant natural resources, rich culture and unparalleled beauty have one-sixth the average income of neighbouring Botswana? While we’re at it, why do twice as many children die in infancy in Azerbaijan as across the border in Georgia? Why do Hungarians work 20 per cent longer than their Austrian neighbours but earn 45 per cent less? Why is extreme poverty 200 times more common in Laos than across the Mekong River in Thailand?

Or how about this one: Why were more than one-quarter of Estonians formerly exposed to dangerous levels of air pollution when the country was socialist while today nearly every Estonian breathes clean air in what is ranked the cleanest country in the world.

These are anecdotes. However, the plural of anecdote is data, and through careful and systematic study of the data, we can learn what works and what doesn’t. Unfortunately, the populist economic policies in vogue among Democrats and Republicans do not work.

What does work is economic freedom.

Economic freedoms are a subset of human freedoms. When people have more economic freedom, they are allowed to make more of their own economic choices—choices about work, about buying and selling goods and services, about acquiring and using property, and about forming contracts with others.

For nearly 30 years, the Fraser Institute has been measuring economic freedom across countries. On one hand, governments can stop people from making their own economic choices through taxes, regulations, barriers to trade and manipulation of the value of money (see the proposals of Harris and Trump above). On the other hand, governments can enable individual economic choice by protecting people and their property.

The index published in Fraser’s annual Economic Freedom of the World report incorporates 45 indicators to measure how governments either prevent or enable individual economic choice. The result reveals the degree of economic freedom in 165 countries and territories worldwide, with data going back to 1970.

According to the latest report, comparatively wealthy Botswanans rank 84 places ahead of Zimbabweans in terms of the economic freedom their government permits them. Georgians rank 107 places ahead of Azerbaijanis, Thais rank 60 places ahead of Laotians, and Austrians are 32 places ahead of Hungarians.

The benefits of economic freedom go far beyond anecdotes and rankings. As Estonia—once one of the least economically free places in the world and now among the freest—dramatically shows, freer countries tend not only to be more prosperous but greener and healthier.

In fact, economists and other social scientists have conducted nearly 1,000 studies using the index to assess the effect of economic freedom on different aspects of human wellbeing. Their statistical comparisons include hundreds and sometimes thousands of data points and carefully control for other factors like geography, natural resources and disease environment.

Their results overwhelmingly support the idea that when people are permitted more economic freedom, they prosper. Those who live in freer places enjoy higher and faster-growing incomes, better health, longer life, cleaner environments, more tolerance, less violence, lower infant mortality and less poverty.

Economic freedom isn’t the only thing that matters for prosperity. Research suggests that culture and geography matter as well. While policymakers can’t always change people’s attitudes or move mountains, they can permit their citizens more economic freedom. If more did so, more people would enjoy the living standards of Botswana or Estonia and fewer people would be stuck in poverty.

As for the U.S., it remains relatively free and prosperous. Whatever its problems, decades of research cast doubt on the notion that America would be better off with policies that chip away at the ability of Americans to make their own economic choices.

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