Is There Nothing That Obama Can’t Do?

Alternative Subsidy 32 Comments

America gets its Volkswagen.

The memo, sent to employees of GE Healthcare Americas team explains that all sedan, crossover, and minivan purchases in 2012 will be replaced by the Chevy Volt. Only field engineers are exempt from having to drive a company Volt.
GE will offer estimates for installation Level 2 Charging Stations, though all-gas use will be allowed when there is no electric option. Any employees who opt out of the Volt program will not be compensated for their expenses. Those who do choose to drive the Volt will be reimbursed for public charging and home charging costs, in addition to gas uses.

32 Replies to “Is There Nothing That Obama Can’t Do?”

  1. Those who do choose to drive the Volt will be reimbursed for public charging and home charging costs, in addition to gas uses.
    Makes you want to phone your broker and put a buy order on GE stock, eh?/
    That snarked, I stopped buying anything made by GE when I found out how much they bankrolled Cap’n WaffleSnarfer in ’08.

  2. Sooooooo. How are these genuises going to figure out how much of the home power bill is extra home charging costs? Maybe buy some “smart” meters from McDinky?

  3. One can only hope that this administration of looters and thugs are defeated and when (not if)GM goes bankrupt again, the game will be over and no future generations are once again looted to buy off spoiled union thugs for votes and kick-backs.

  4. GE can do anything they want….At their peril.
    The law of unintended consequences will catch up with them sooner or later. Sit back and enjoy the show.

  5. Yeah, right, John Chittick! If Mittens gets in, “Weepy” will be glad to let the RIGHT people swill at the government trough this time…

  6. A base Volt here is $45K, a Nissan Leaf is $41K. I’d love to drive an electric in Vancouver where it won’t freeze and I don’t really need a heater but not at those prices. For $45K I’ll look at a fuel efficient Audi A4, thank you very much.

  7. What’s the line? It’s easy when you’re spending someone else’s money.
    Subsidize, subsidize, subsidize!!!

  8. You’re right, Oz. If I was a GE shareholder I’d be furious. This is MY money they’re pi$$ing away.

  10. Obama makes you drive his car,
    Even if it won’t go too far,
    Obama makes you drive his car,
    And Obama still hates you,
    Beep, Beep, Beep, Beep, Yeah!
    With no apologies to them English Beatles.

  11. So when Harley -Davidson was doing poorly in the ’80s for a variety of reasons (not the least of which the fact that they were vibrating, oil-leaking, unreliable pieces of crap), the Reagan administration didn’t use tax dollars to bail them out. Instead, they applied a huge import tariff to other brands – specifically the Japanese big 4. This had the desired effect of swaying people away from the Japanese just long enough for H-D to employ Japanese engineers and technology to improve their bikes (most notably the ‘Evolution’ engine.
    All this worked fairly well. H-D came back from the edge of the cliff and still exists today for the traditionalist U.S. biker. The Japanese, Italians and Germans continued to improve upon the high end technologies in their products and do very well – better than ever.
    And now the Obama administration’s cluster f*ck. I guess it’s hard to enhance the tax base through trade tariffs when the domestic product and the competition is already too expensive. So instead, they rape the taxpayers further by offering incentives to buy the overpriced, undervalued piece of crap and then do backroom deals so that electric companies that pay no taxes become the best customers of car companies that get bailed out by taxpayer dollars. (all this while GM spends over $3 billion developing what has been described as the worst consumer product of 2011 – again with taxpayer dollars. Don’t they still owe $30 billion?).
    Heil Obama!

  12. Only bit of sanity in that whole thing is exempting field engineers from this charade. I know and work with many “road dogs” in the medical industry and not one of them would be able to do their job with a vehicle that got 40 miles per 12 hour charge. Think the wait time for a CT or MRI is long now, try to see how long it would be if the engineers have to respond to trouble calls in 40 mile steps?

  13. This is MY money they’re pi$$ing away.
    ~cgh
    You don’t even have to be a stockholder, just an American taxpayer.
    Why?
    Because Obama has been giving GE a tax holiday( in fact, GE got a $3.2 billion tax benefit in 2010) so the money GE would have been paying in taxes is being frittered away on the Volt yet again.

  16. So what is being accomplished by switching from low carbon gasoline to high carbon coal. I guess it’s all for appearance and nobody really gives a $hit. The only problem is if GM sells too many Volts at $150,000 loss apiece, we are going to be bailing out GM soon.

  18. Ronald Reagan said it best: ” Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”

  22. I’m assuming every employee is part of a four person family? Hard to stuff 5,6,7 people into a volt.

  23. Brian M:
    That’s all true about Harley but that doesn’t justify the government assistance.
    See: Bastiat’s “what is seen and what is unseen”.
    Hint: HD (seen) via gubment got its dough from somewhere else (unseen). The gubment doesn’t have any dough of it’s own.

  24. Only engineers are exempt. Why would engineers want to weasel out of the Government Motors engineering marvel?

  25. Check my math, but if the gov’t is offering a $10K subsidy (just raised from $7.5K)per Volt, doesn’t this mean that taxpayers will be providing a further $120.000,000 ‘subsidy’ to GE?
    And won’t GE likely then colude with ‘green’ gov’ts like Vancouver’s – who have just announced they are going to spend $800K on charging stations on an “if we build them, they will come” basis?
    Doncha just love getting hosed by all levels of government?

  26. This is simply a pissing contest between Obama and the fossil fuel loving public. Hitler had the “peoples car” and Obama has the Volt. You vill buy it. You vill enjoy it. Ve vill make u go green.

  28. Huge difference between the Bug and the Volt. The bug was a useful, reliable means of transport.
    The Volt says that the owner is an enlightened, caring individual. In THEIR mind.
    The Bug says that their owner is a rational person who needs to get from point A to point B.

  29. Oh, don’t worry. This is a clear vioation of employee rights, so the unions will be all over it.

  30. They have already tried this in the past… Anyone remember the GM EV1?! The city of Tempe was the launch customer for them, but they didn’t even get a chance to break them in, let alone wear them out, before they were all rounded up and buried in the desert! How much did THAT failed effort cost?!
    Just goes to show its not so much what you use but how you use it, I constantly see huge trucks and suv’s on the roads into work with only one head in each one, all trying to find a parking spot at the same office buildings in the same city!

  31. The Daughter-in-law had a VW Beetle, it was a pretty l’il Bug but the electronics was shit and the windshield wipers stayed on 24/7 wet or dry and when VW turned them off finally they never worked again. I see the volt going the way of the Chevette, the corvair and the Citation.
    But the final destination for the volts will be in HazMat auto junkyards.

  32. Zon said: “I constantly see huge trucks and suv’s on the roads into work with only one head in each one, all trying to find a parking spot at the same office buildings in the same city!”
    Yeah, about that. I constantly see small cars upside-down in the median on Arizona highways. In Ontario I constantly see small cars with deer embedded halfway to the windshield and the engine in the passenger compartment. And in both places I constantly see people do insane things in front of me with their cars, usually with a phone to their ear.
    This may help explain the plethora of large trucks. As to carpooling, think for a moment how it would be if society (or government) decided who was going to ride in your car every morning.
    Because that’s the thing all these carpool fans forget. ITS -YOUR- CAR. And your gas. Voluntary carpooling among friends, I’m all for it. Involuntary carpooling? Nightmare.

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