Caution ... Chuck Schumer is Back! Going Going ... Gonif
March 5, 2012
President Obama boasted at a United Auto Workers conference last week that General Motors was back in business, producing cutting-edge vehicles like the plug-in electric Chevrolet Volt. He even promised to buy one when his time in office ends “five years from now.”
Whoops! Just three days later, GM announced that it would suspend Volt production for five weeks this spring, idling 1,300 workers at a Hamtramck, Mich., factory.
Alas, Obama’s endorsements notwithstanding, there’s not much of a market for this little bitty car, at least not at the price of almost $32,000 — after a $7,500 federal tax rebate.
So much for Obama’s goal of 1 million all-electrics and plug-ins on the road by 2015.
A123 Systems, a maker of electric-car batteries that has received $374 million in state and federal loans, announced 125 layoffs last fall. The cause: problems at its main customer, Fisker Automotive, which builds expensive plug-in electric cars. Fisker got a half-billion in loans from the Energy Department, though the money was recently frozen because of the company’s failure to meet production targets.
These events confirm the wasteful folly of allocating capital according to the dictates of politicians, such as when Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) declared in November 2008: “A business model based on gas — a gas-guzzling past — is unacceptable. We need a business model based on cars of the future, and we already know what that future is: the plug-in hybrid electric car.”
Biting the hand that feeds IT
