Free Republic

Bailouts: President Obama is going to Detroit Wednesday to brag about how he saved the U.S. auto industry. What he's really doing is exposing the folly of his industrial policy. Just days before Obama's planned swing through Detroit, the Treasury Dept. reported that the final taxpayer cost of the auto industry bailout was $9.26 billion. That equals $441 for every single car and light truck that GM and Chrysler have sold since 2009. That's an awfully big price tag for Obama to claim bragging rights over. Maybe the outsized bailout cost explains why Obama will give his talk at an...

Back in the good old days when President Obama didn't have so many dings on his record, he promised that by 2015 there'd be more than 1 million electric cars on the road. Well, with just days to go, he's only about 826,000 or so cars short of that goal. Instead of 200,000 Nissan Leafs on the road today -- as Obama's Department of Energy predicted in 2011 -- there are less than 70,000...

Industrial Policy: This week, the world's largest carmaker said electric cars are a joke, and a congressional report said federal subsidies are a waste. You'd think that would shock President Obama out of his electric car fantasy . Back in March 2009, Obama announced plans to pour billions of taxpayer dollars into the development of electric cars in the form of grants, federal loans and tax credits. "This investment will not only reduce our dependence on foreign oil, it will put Americans back to work," Obama promised. "It positions American manufacturers on the cutting edge of innovation and solving our...

As the Obama campaign continues to tout the GM bailout as an industrial policy success, the Treasury Department continues to revise upward the staggering losses inflicted on U.S. taxpayers. On the day Government Motors, aka GM, announced it was recalling at least 38,000 of its vehicles — Impalas used by police nationwide and in Canada — due to a crash risk, a new Treasury report said it now expects to lose $25 billion on the bailout, $3.3 billion more than forecast earlier. As the Detroit News reported, this loss was based on GM's stock price at the time of the...

Environmental Impacts: An investigation is launched into the possibility of battery fires occurring in crashes involving Government Motors' touted electric car. Industrial policy meets the law of unintended consequences. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has announced an investigation into the safety of electric cars using lithium batteries, particularly the Chevy Volt, after a battery fire occurred after a side-impact crash test. It has asked other manufacturers who make electric cars or that plan to do so for information on how they handle lithium-ion batteries. The request also includes recommendations for minimizing fire risk. The feds say this is only...

Industrial Policy: The administration's electric car represents both the genius of American technology and the stupidity of its government. Imagine Rube Goldberg with $50 billion. Buy now and get a free 40-mile-long extension cord. It wasn't exactly Michael Dukakis riding in a tank wearing a Snoopy helmet, but it was close. President Obama, who reportedly hasn't driven an inch himself since taking office, visited a GM plant in Hamtramck near Detroit on Friday to drive a Chevy Volt 10 feet off an assembly line. It was a perfect image, as the American economy is being driven off a cliff by...

Green Technology: Government Motors' all-electric car isn't all-electric and doesn't get near the touted hundreds of miles per gallon. Like "shovel-ready" jobs, maybe there's no such thing as "plug-ready" cars either. The Chevy Volt, hailed by the Obama administration as the electric savior of the auto industry and the planet, makes its debut in showrooms next month, but it's already being rolled out for test drives by journalists. It appears we're all being taken for a ride. When President Obama visited a GM plant in Hamtramck near Detroit a few months ago to drive a Chevy Volt 10 feet off...

Industrial Policy: Not only do taxpayers subsidize failing green energy here, they may soon be on the hook for a Department of Energy loan to a firm owned by a Russian billionaire. Just say nyet. When a foreign firm wants to build a facility in the U.S. that hires American workers and pays American taxes, we welcome it. We'd prefer they do it with their own money, not rely on this administration's failed industrial policy to provide them with a huge taxpayer-backed loan — especially when it's owned by a billionaire who doesn't need the help. The administration's latest green...

China’s September data suggest that the long-term overcapacity problem is only intensifying /snip Industrial policies create overcapacity I agree with the last paragraph, but otherwise I am pretty skeptical about the fight against overcapacity. According to my model of China’s overcapacity problem, the source of the imbalance is a set of industrial policies that systematically shift income from households to producers, and as long as these policies continue there is little chance of resolving the problem of excess production. I have a longish piece coming out next month as a Carnegie Brief on the Carnegie Endowment website, in which I...

President Obama may have "no interest" in running General Motors, as he averred Monday. But even if that's true, we are already discovering that he shares Washington with 535 Members of Congress, many of whom have other ideas. The latest self-appointed car czar is Massachusetts's own Barney Frank, who intervened this week to save a GM distribution center in Norton, Mass. The warehouse, which employs some 90 people, was slated for closure by the end of the year under GM's restructuring plan. But Mr. Frank put in a call to GM CEO Fritz Henderson and secured a new lease on...

Studebaker, Nash-Kelvinator, Packard, Hudson, Stutz, Pierce-Arrow, Stanley, Checker and American Motors were once household names of the U.S. auto industry. Unlike General Motors in our time, they were not too big to fail. Despite mergers and rescue efforts by their owners, each was shut down. Their legacy lives on as classic cars, restored with erotic affection by collectors. GM's end is different. In the spirit of the new age, General Motors, like Citigroup and AIG, will be kept alive in an industrial coma. One has to ask: Is this where the entire country is headed? Since January, it looks like...

President Obama has cast himself as a reluctant interventionist in two of the nation’s major industries, Wall Street and Detroit. The federal aid, he says, is a financial bridge to a postcrisis future and the hand-holding will be temporary. Even so, the scale of the government investment and control — especially by the auto task force now vetting plans at Chrysler and General Motors — points to an approach that has been shunned by the United States more than other developed nations. “By any coherent definition, this is industrial policy,” said Marcus Noland, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute...

[Obama] will change American capitalism in fundamental ways--in particular, he will alter the relationship between the government and the economy. My argument rests on what he has actually proposed to do and how his proposals, if enacted, would situate his administration in the history of American economic reform. Americans have been notoriously loath to undertake reforms that increase the role of government. That goes back partly to our Lockean liberal heritage of minimal government that marks us off from Europe with its absolutist past. The only times that Americans have permitted major changes in government's role have been during economic...

I am having trouble fully appreciating the phenomenon that is Senator Obama. Certainly, Obama’s overpowering charisma has an amazing effect on any listener, such as spontaneous tears or quasi-erotic tingling in one’s leg. (The latter phenomenon is dubbed the "Matthews syndrome” after a man whose capacity for rational thought has been completely destroyed by the syndrome’s effects.) For me, however, any such tingling is immediately recognized and countered by my brain, which forces the nascent Obasm to a premature and unsatisfying conclusion. Usually, my brain counters the Obasm by asking difficult and disturbing questions. For example, I will begin trembling...

Back then, on the streets of Harlem, he'd take a full swing at his foes. He was a high school dropout, a dead-end kid until he picked himself up and put on that military uniform. In the Korean War he fought like hell, brought back a couple of medals, too. After he came home, he set himself on a course straight as a ruler: college, law school, assistant U.S. attorney, politics. Charlie Rangel is 76 now and the dean of New York's congressional delegation. It's been more than 50 years since those days as a street fighter, but this fall's...

Technology and Economic Analysis Group February 2002 U.S Department of Commerce Technology Administration R&D and Long-Term Competitiveness: Manufacturing’s Central Role in a Knowledge-Based Economy Gregory Tassey Senior Economist National Institute of Standards and Technology Technology Administration Department of Commerce tassey@nist.gov 301-975-2663 February 2002 Abstract The “Internet Revolution” induced an unbalanced perspective on future economic growth strategies. Because information technology (IT) largely constitutes an infrastructure upon which other economic activity is based, its economic role is to facilitate the productivity of investment in a wide range of products and services that meet final demand. Other economies around the world can and...