AMERICAN.COM

As I have written before, the Obama administration’s fixation on electric cars is scandalous, taking money from the poor and middle class to subsidize well-off environmentalists who want to drive a green vanity car.

Well, we can add another chapter to this saga, as yet another entry to the electric car market demonstrates just how absurdly non-economic these cars are. Final pricing has been announced for the Fisker Karma plug-in hybrid.

As John Voelcker reports in Fox News,

The price of the extended-range electric sports sedan has gone up. Again. Originally announced in 2008 at a price of $80,000, the Karma fairly quickly went up to $87,900 and stayed there. Now, just before launch, ‘final pricing’ has risen another $8,000. Based on an e-mail forwarded to us last night and originally sent by Fisker of Santa Monica, the final pricing for the 2011 Fisker Karma is:

• Eco Standard: $95,900
• Eco Sport: $103,900
• Eco Chic: $108,900

There’s also a mandatory destination charge of $950 on top of those prices.

Voelcker points out that this $100,000 car qualifies for a federal income tax credit of $7,500, and a rebate of $5,000 in California. And on batteries, it’ll go a whole 50 miles in ideal conditions.

The continued subsidization of plug-in hybrid and electric cars is leading the country toward another corn ethanol boondoggle: tax dollars are being used to build a new “industry” that can only be sustained by a constant stream of subsidies from the taxpayer’s pocket. The fossil-fuel power that will charge most of these cars will likely exacerbate environmental problems, rather than mitigating them.

Image by Matthew Hine.

Who are the real Scrooges in America? The “hard-hearted” Tea Partiers who would rather hold onto their own money than have Uncle Sam decide who should have it? Don’t take House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s word for it. Check out the data on charitable giving in my new Wall Street Journal op-ed, then decide for yourself whom should get coal in their stockings.

Image by Howard Lake.

The census released its reapportionment report this week. I will write a couple of longer pieces on how reapportionment will affect the electoral college count in 2012 and another on redistricting prospects. But here are a few interesting facts from the 2010 Census.

1.       America is growing. In the ten years from April 1, 2000 to April 10, 2010, the U.S. population grew 9.7 percent, from 281,421,906 to 308,745,538.

2.       We are growing faster than most other developed countries: 9.7 percent growth over the past ten years is a much faster rate of growth than most developed countries are experiencing. Germany is expected to shrink in the past decade. And Europe as a whole will grow less than 1 percent.

3.       But America’s growth rate is slowing. The past decade saw America grow at a slower rate than it has in any decade since the 1930s. The 1990s saw America grow 13.2 percent, which was up very significantly from the slower growth 1980s, when America grew 9.8 percent, just slightly faster than it did in the past ten years.

Until more details figures are released, the exact components of the change will not be known. But this decade was expected to be slower growing than the last because of population aging. It is very likely that the economic slowdown at the end of the decade also slowed the birth rate and net immigration rate. A very significant slowing of population growth was evident in Nevada, Florida, and Arizona, which still grew at a fast rate, but saw that rate slow with our economic troubles.

During this charitable season, remember who really gives.

As Gabriel Nelson of Greenwire reports, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has taken one step closer to stripping the state of Texas of the right to determine how it wants to control air pollution. The EPA has given Texas final warning that if they do not implement new requirements for the regulation of greenhouse gases (which several states have challenged in court), the EPA will take over the authority to grant operating permits to industry in Texas itself.

Texas Governor Perry is fighting the takeover, of course, but EPA has rarely been faced down in court. The action, which is nearly unprecedented in the history of the Clean Air Act, suggests that rather than backing down on EPA’s regulatory putsch, the Obama administration plans to double down and run the country as a permitocracy.

EPA’s threat letter is here.

Arthur Brooks at the Commonwealth Club of California.

One of the unwritten, unspoken, and rarely thought assumptions of those buying medicines is that they will work. We take it for granted that the medicines we buy work as the scientists who developed the product intended. And, for Americans, the overwhelming likelihood is that the medicine will do just that. But in many places the odds worsen, and for myriad reasons.

The reasons are far too complex to explain adequately in one post, and their solutions require an entire book (the one I’m trying to write). But the reasons largely come down to three problems: counterfeit, substandard, and degraded products. Simplifying reality, these are products intentionally made badly, products unintentionally made badly, and good products that become bad because of bad storage.

This recent paper attempts to look at these causes and its findings are worrisome, especially for African countries. Nearly 20 percent of the drugs we tested failed at least one quality control test; they almost certainly wouldn’t work as intended. The situation is also quite troubling in some parts of Asia.

But now we’ve gone further. In a working paper published todaywe analyzed the variability of products that passed all the basic quality control tests (many which were registered as good quality in many countries). And again a disturbing picture emerges. Some drug makers, most registered in the countries where they sell products, are either cutting corners or are incapable of making good enough products to maintain consistent standards.

So who performed well? Three types of producers formed about 60 percent of our sample—western innovators, western generic manufacturers, and large Indian generic manufacturers. All three of these types of players consistently made good products. The rest: small Indian producers, those from other Asian countries, and especially those made in Africa, had notable numbers of drugs fail variability tests.

The conclusion is that it is not safe to assume that all medicines are created equal. It really is a case of caveat emptor.

So the FCC has mandated, via a party-line vote, new net neutrality rules. This sets the stage for two things. First is a protracted legal battle by the regulated firms as they argue the FCC lacks the authority to regulate in this manner.

The second and more interesting development: this will spur the push for the REINS Act in the next Congress. The REINS Act is welcome legislation sponsored by Representative Geoff Davis and Senator Jim DeMint that would subject significant new federal rules to congressional vote. The new FCC rules would qualify. There is good reason to think bipartisan regulatory reform is possible in the next Congress. Thanks to the FCC’s action, the odds just increased that Congress will act.

Image by dailyinvention.