Obama’s Green Auto Decrees to Cost 260,000 Jobs

There’s a price to be paid for the trendy green posturing of our sanctimonious moonbat rulers, in terms of not only money but jobs:

The Detroit News’s dogged David Shepardson has unearthed a study by one of world’s most respected automotive research firms that reveals that President Obama’s radical CAFE mandate that vehicles average — average! — 62 MPG by 2025 “could force vehicle prices up by nearly $10,000, reduce sales by 5.5 million vehicles annually, and eliminate more than 260,000 jobs.”

If you expect to be buying a car in the 2020s, you’d best start saving now.

The CAR study also reveals that Obama’s NHTSA and EPA have been gaming the figures when it comes to the cost of their new rules. The center’s study predicts it will cost between $3,744 and $9,790 per vehicle, while the agencies have low-balled the figure at $770 to $3,500 per vehicle.

As with all Obama policies, the long-term effects on the economy will be devastating.

The resulting costs would shrink the new-car market, with 5.5 million potential buyers disappearing (and manufacturing jobs with them) by 2025. That assumes that the auto fleet can even be built to meet such an absurd spec. Currently, no car — much less the average — meets 62 mpg. Indeed, only a handful of small vehicles meet the 35-mpg fleet-wide standard mandated in just five years.

What’s the point of insane rulings dictating standards that aren’t economically or technologically feasible? Here’s a clue:

As a result, there is more gaming of the system, as automakers pour lobbying money into D.C. to effect regulatory agency rules handing credits to electric cars — whether customers buy them or not.

Everything liberal government does has a single objective: to increase its wealth and power at the expense of our wealth and liberty. Impoverishing America by destroying the free market economy is both an inevitable byproduct of that objective, and a means toward it.

smart-car-wreck.jpg
They won’t get 62 mph by making cars more safe.

On a tip from Byron. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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