Back to Basics

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Cranking up the Chevy Volt subsidy from $7,500 to $10,000 isn’t “fresh” news. The proposal is in the White House 2013 budget that Harry Reid is sitting on, but President Obama continues to promote the idea as essential to decreasing America’s dependence on the free market… er, I mean oil:

President Barack Obama is touting a new series of green-tech subsidies in North Carolina Wednesday, simultaneously trying to goose his prospects in the swing-state and to jump-start his stalled plan to minimize the nation’s use of gasoline.

The new subsidies include an expansion of the $7,500 subsidy for the wealthy buyers of the Chevy Volt.

If Congress approves Obama’s proposal, the government will be giving $10,000 in taxpayer money to people wealthy enough to buy novel green-tech autos that are powered by batteries or natural-gas.

The new $10,000 credit, according to a White House statement, should “be applied to additional types of technologies, not currently covered.”

If this doesn’t work, can “buy one, get one free” be far behind?

The $10,000 subsidy proposal wouldn’t be confined only to Volts, because that wouldn’t be nearly expensive enough to save money in the long run. It’s all part of a billion dollar proposal to promote “alternative” vehicles:

President Barack Obama used his visit to a North Carolina truck manufacturer on Wednesday to announce a $1 billion program to promote electric and other alternative vehicles through tax incentives for consumers and federal grants to states to finance infrastructure to support them.
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The plan also includes a “Race to the Top” contest that would award grants to states with “model communities” that invest in the infrastructure to support those vehicles, such as charging stations or natural gas corridors “where alternative fuel trucks can transport goods without using a drop of oil,” the White House Press Fact Sheet on the program states.

So far the only thing that appears to be engaged in an aggressive “race to the top” as a result of all this is the national debt.

I get into a lot arguments with conservatives over very non-conservative causes they believe in. For some reason there are just some conservatives who do not have a problem with certain unconstitutional acts. And just like liberals do, they all sorts of ways to justify their support for said heinous things. You know, like how Ron Paul finds ways to justify requesting earmarks for his district while simultaneously claiming to be against earmarks.

One of these non-conservative things that conservatives seem often to hold dear are farm subsidies. Of course there is no constitutional authority for such programs. But still I am told often as a matter of fact by “conservative” people that these subsidies are needed and that farmers cannot live without them. According to the standard line these subsidies provide price stability for consumers and prevent our food supply from becoming beholden to foreign suppliers. They want to believe the laws of economics can be violated at will on the issue of paying farmers bonuses for acting the way the government wants them to act or subsidize said farmers to compensate them for the harsh effects of silly and senseless regulations previously passed by government and which are eating away at their normal profits.

Farm subsidies are a major taboo for some conservatives. Much like ending Welfare is taboo for liberals. Those that defend either however simply are not thinking rationally.

Farm subsidies go mostly to only certain crops and activities and mostly to a very select few “farmers” which tend to be huge corporate entities. Not that there is anything wrong with corporate farms mind you. Although some people have an irrational fear of them. Now, these farm subsides include, from highest to lowest in 2010: corn, wheat, soybeans, cotton, rice, sorghum, livestock, tobacco (something government claims to hate and get rid of), peanuts, barley, the dairy industry, sunflowers, canola, oat, wool, flax and “trees”[1]. There are also huge payments made to programs for disaster relief and conservation as well as wetlands preservation.

Recently one of my conservative friends, who like many conservatives needs to research their arguments in support of silly programs like farm subsidies better, recently ranted and raved about how without farm subsidies we would be outsourcing our produce to China. He said that if I thought it was bad now, with strawberries overflowing on our store shelves from Mexico, wait until we stopped subsidizing farmers.

Of course my IBD (Internal Bunk Detector) went off immediately. I tried to point out, without the exact numbers at hand, how this was simply wrong knowing full well that the last time I looked at strawberries at my local grocer they were all from California. He however, continued to disagree. Nope, Mexican strawberries, he said, were a real threat and overwhelming us. On top of this recent exchange, I get emails every week from “conservatives” defending farm subsidies and that “90% of our strawberries come from Mexico.” I don’t know where this claim comes from. A simple web search resulted in no rambling conspiracy theories on the topic. But it has apparently been engrained deeply into the brains of some people none-the-less.