Freedom Line Blog

Environmentalists’ dreams of highways filled with electric cars continue to crash and burn.  Literally.

Fresh off news that the Chevy Volt will undergo an internal redesign to make the car less susceptible to catching fire up to three weeks after it is impacted in an accident, William La Jeunesse of Fox News reports how taxpayers are getting burned even if they never purchase the car.

“Politicans love to get in front of something they think is the future, the problem is they do it poorly, they waste money and they just don’t have an impact on the overall economy,” says economist James Hohman of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

When all the federal and state subsidies to General Motors and its Volt suppliers are totaled, Hohman estimates each Volt sold costs taxpayers as much as $250,000.

Here’s the most outrageous numbers:

According to the CEO of General Motors, the average annual income of buyers of the Chevy Volt is $170,000. Those who buy the luxury electric Fisker Karma or Tesla roadster earn more than $250,000 a year. Yet every wealthy buyer receives a hefty handout from Uncle Sam, adding more than $8,500 to the federal debt for every car sold.

Once upon a time limousine liberals could be counted on to at least foot the charge for their gas bill.  Now, the rest of us are stuck paying for their environmental guilt trips.

In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses President Obama’s recent praise of Chevrolet’s new taxpayer-subsidized electric car – the Chevy Volt – as the first step towards realizing his vision for a clean energy economy.  Calling it “the perfect metaphor for the Obama Administration,”  Giachino says the Volt “costs too much, does too little, and can’t live up to the media hype.”