It’s time to admit that the Biden administration might be something more than snake-bit. The latest evidence of actual clinical incompetence is its 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicles, announced Tuesday. [emphasis, links added]
If the goal is to get Americans to use EVs, how does it make sense to raise their cost to consumers? It doesn’t.
The real explanation is the familiar process by which bad policy begets bad policy—in this case, the disaster unfolding in Detroit saddled with billions in losses for EVs the public won’t buy at anything resembling the cost of building them.
If the New York Times is correct, the tariffs won’t apply to Chinese-built gasoline cars. President Biden perhaps doesn’t understand his own Rube Goldberg setup well enough to realize that Detroit’s gasoline-vehicle profits are desperately needed to support his electric-vehicle boondoggle.
Mr. Biden’s staff is using protectionism to conceal the fiscal and industrial fiasco he’s conjuring with his EV policy.
We speak admiringly of strategic thinkers who can “see around corners.” The Biden administration is apparently unable even to see the next obvious thing that’s going to happen.
Its Afghanistan withdrawal only landed the U.S. in a more costly and dangerous war by inciting Vladimir Putin.
Its attempt to appease Mr. Putin with the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and other gestures had the opposite of the desired effect.
Mr. Biden’s plan to amplify his credit for America’s post-Covid recovery, which he was going to get anyway, blew up when his additional splurge of relief spending stoked the inflation that sours voters now on his economic management. …snip…
Mr. Biden’s staff is using protectionism to conceal the fiscal and industrial fiasco he’s conjuring with his EV policy.
In symbolism as well as dollar terms, however, Mr. Biden’s EV own goal is perhaps his most emblematic in a succession of own goals, which may well cost him the crucial state of Michigan.
Even Mr. Biden’s top climate officials, if granted anonymity, will admit green energy subsidies do nothing to cut fossil-fuel use and reduce emissions.
His climate strategy embodies exactly the kind of “fast” but faulty thinking the late Nobelist Daniel Kahneman wrote a book warning about.
Unfortunately, fast thinking is the only kind Mr. Biden does.
Not helping are certain New York Times columnists who, despite knowing better, still strain to grant him FDR-like virtues. They seem to forget the aging cipher maneuvered into the 2020 nomination to block Bernie Sanders.
His rise was due entirely to party leaders who accurately foresaw that Mr. Biden could hide in his basement and let a once-a-century pandemic defeat Donald Trump.
Mr. Trump is a politician of instinct too—his main instinct being a bottomless cynicism about people like Mr. Biden.
Top image via NBC News YouTube/screencap
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