OK, please imagine for a moment that you recently cashed in all your Christmas or Hanukkah and birthday money to purchase ingredients to open a curbside lemonade stand, only to discover that your nutrition-conscious neighbors weren't all that interested in buying your product.
Making matters worse, Suzi, your competitor across the street whose daddy and mommy own a grocery store that sold you the sugar and lemons, got hers for free and made her lemonade even sweeter.
So after you put up a sign telling passers-by that parent-subsidized Suzi isn't being fair, blaming her for your market losses, her parents respond by not selling you sugar and jacking up prices of sour lemons.
Welcome to the bitterly cruel world of Bidenomics, electric vehicle (EV) subsidies, a new 100% tariff on Chinese imports, and Beijing's control of the rare earth minerals needed for those big energy-hungry plug-in batteries as the administration continues to block U.S. mining projects.
Beijing supply chain shackles take on foreboding future leverage amid existing U.S. and European concerns that low-priced Chinese government-subsidized EVs could flood softening markets that drive their own struggling industries out of business.
Start with the reality that EVs are already taxpayer sugar-high subsidy market losers, which in the process are poisoning the U.S. automobile and labor industries for practical and affordable products we want.
Little wonder that as of last September, EVs were requiring at least twice as long to sell as gas-powered vehicles and gas-electric hybrids.
Don't count on them to get you anywhere under bitter-cold Wisconsin, Minnesota, or Alaska winter conditions, where battery efficiency can drop vehicle range by nearly half.
Forget them as an essential means to work a Kansas farm, haul horses on a Texas ranch, tow a boat to the lake, or go remote off-road camping.
Despite enormous federal and state taxpayer subsidies and other perk incentives, the upfront cost of EVs is much higher than gasoline models, making them most popular for wealthy urban purchasers with an average income of about $150,000 — double the $75,000 American median household income — who can afford them as second cars for short trips.
EVs have also been found to have 79% more problems than gasoline-powered vehicles and are also much more expensive to repair if in an accident, in turn causing them to be 23% more expensive to insure.
As for saving the planet, according to Department of Transportation estimates, taxpayers are being squeezed to subsidize green lemons with generous federal and state purchase credit handouts which will reduce average global temperatures in 2060 by 0.000%.
And whereas President Joe Biden has campaigned that his green subsidies and mandates will create hundreds of thousands of jobs, legitimately skeptical rank-and-file labor union workers aren't seeing them.
As noted in the Wall Street Journal, "Auto makers have cut thousands of jobs to finance the government-forced EV transition. Bloomberg News last week reported that Ford lost more than $100,000 per EV in the first quarter."
EVs are proving to be no bargain for purchasers either.
With no thanks to the Biden administration's other force-fed "green renewable" policy, which has raised electricity prices, fueling a Ford F-Series truck now costs about $17 per 100 miles on average compared to $17.75 for an F-150 Lightning with mostly home-charging — and $26.39 with mostly commercial chargers.
Here again, China benefits by dominating global production of solar panels and critical minerals used in those renewables.
And whereas new China tariffs will also include other vital EV components such as aluminum for lightweight bodies (25%), lithium-ion batteries (25%), critical minerals (25%), and semiconductors (50%), limited global supplies will drive already high production costs up even further.
Don't expect Beijing to take any desperate Biden campaign posturing recriminations any more seriously than it did last year when it imposed export controls on graphite — a critical material in EV batteries — in ostensible retaliation for excluding China in the Democrat Inflation Reduction Act's tax-credit eligibility terms.
Meanwhile, as the Biden administration imposes billions of dollars of EV subsidy expenses on taxpayers and saddles their producers with billions more in lost revenues, its 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicles won't apply to Chinese-built gasoline cars that might compete for existing markets.
In doing so, it is using Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, the same law that former President Donald Trump recently threatened to use if elected to impose a 100% tariff on all cars produced by Chinese firms in Mexico.
As observed by Wall Street Journal editors, whereas the White House says its border taxes are better than Trump's because they "are carefully targeted at strategic sectors—the same sectors where the United States is making historic investments under President Biden," in reality, those "strategic sectors" refer to his targeting of subsidies for political reasons.
Nevertheless, with wastelands of unwanted EVs piling up in car lots everywhere and dumpster fires of failed economic green energy policies ablaze across the country, that political calculation might heed lessons from Suzi's lemonade stand across the street.
Don't go on a sugar high selling lemon products most people don't want that depend upon ingredients you don't have and that she controls.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.
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