The Obama administration is taking a lot of heat for handing out $529 million to Fisker Automobile who then turned around and manufactured a luxury vehicle in Finland.
According to Newser, Fisker claimed there weren’t any factories suitable for building the car in the United States. Don’t worry though, they promise that all of the government’s money (your tax dollars) went towards funding engineering and design work that was done in the U.S.
The company’s founder, Henrik Fisker, claims that if he’d built a factory “where it was too expensive,” he’d fail like Solyndra did.
We’re not in the business of failing; we’re in the business of winning … That’s why we went to Finland,” he said.
He insists that it’s no big deal because the government approved the decision, as long as the government’s free money stayed in the US.
However, the problem is that this is definitely not what Obama’s administration of central economic planning had in mind.
Joe Biden announced the loan in his home state of Delaware, at a closed auto plant. He promised that it would bring new manufacturing jobs.
Oops.
Obviously a lot of people are upset by this, especially when debt and the handing out of easy money to the government’s preferred entities seems to be largely responsible for the current economic uncertainty the entire world is dealing with.
We are being led to believe that eventually the loaning of funds to Fisker will result in jobs being created here, yet evidence gathering is leading Popular Mechanics to openly question whether or not Fisker will ever build cars in the US.
There is also a problem with the fuel efficiency of Fisker’s Karma extended-range electric sport sedan. For a $529 million loan, Fisker produced a car that gets 20 miles-per-gallon on gas, and 32 miles on its all electric battery.
It’s not exactly the game changer than the government was promising us.
Hybrids and electric cars are most likely the future of transportation, but can we please be done with the giveaways of hundreds of millions of our tax dollars to companies?
It doesn’t seem to be working out very well.
The crazy thing is that there was a large group of people in the public and in politics who were against handing out economic stimulus funds from the very beginning, yet those people were portrayed as meanies for not trusting the Obama administration’s ability to stimulate the economy.
I mean only bad people would oppose Obama’s economic plan right? After all, he went to Harvard Law School so he must know how to manage our incomes better than we do, right?
It doesn’t matter what party a politician belongs to or what their background is. If they think handing out billions of tax dollars to companies in a wacky economic stimulus manifesto is going to fix our economic problems, then they don’t understand the problem in the first place.
I’d love for a 200 mile-per-gallon plus hybrid like the Aptera to exist. But not if they have to approach the government for hundreds of millions of dollars in handouts to get the ball rolling. If only we could opt out of these economic stimulus plans.
