President Biden has a couple of problems. Electric vehicles aren’t flying off the lot. Autoworkers’ unions are mad at him for pushing EVs which could kill their jobs. So, what’s Biden’s administration’s solution to this two-tiered conundrum?
To put it bluntly, he is now speeding up the delivery of $15.5 billion — courtesy of the U.S. taxpayers — to artificially hold up the market in hopes of appeasing his political allies.
On Thursday, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced that the U.S. government will now release $10 billion in the form of loans. $2 billion thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act to the industry, and $3.5 billion in the form of grants.
“While we transition to EVs, we want to ensure that workers can transition in place, that there is no worker, no community left behind,” Granholm said to reporters on a call.
Except, the U.S. isn’t transitioning to EVs. In fact, these vehicles are sitting in dealers’ lots for days on end, according to reports. Why? Well, for one, EVs are more expensive on average than their gas-guzzling counterparts. According to the data, the average price of a new combustible engine car was roughly $48,000, while a new electric car was $55,000.
They aren’t just costly to buy either—EVs are a pain to fix. According to one report, EV drivers have to wait nearly two months to get their cars repaired while shelling out an average cost of $6,587 to fix it.
The Biden administration is doing all this under the guise of fighting climate change. However, experts say that the production of EVs requires fewer workers, and therefore would hurt thousands of blue-collar workers.
Earlier this month, Politico reported that the Biden administration was trying to figure out how it could force its EV goal while also currying favor with autoworkers’ unions. As the paper noted, Biden is depending upon these unions to help get out the vote for the president in crucial swing states. But union members and Union of Autoworkers have leaders threatened they wouldn’t help unless the Biden administration could guarantee the EV drive wouldn’t screw over workers at various factories. The UAW also has yet to endorse Biden for 2024.
Now, it seems the Biden administration has figured out how it can temporarily please the UAW. According to the press release, the newly announced funding will be “primarily focused on retooling existing factories for the transition to electric vehicles (EVs)—supporting good jobs and a just transition to EVs.”
Yet according to a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, retrofitting existing plants won’t prevent thousands of auto-manufacturing jobs from being eliminated.
“Michigan will still lose at least 25,000 auto-manufacturing jobs. Ohio and Indiana will lose 14,000 and 16,000 respectively,” even if the major auto companies kept their market share and updated their factories for EVs, according to Linda McMahon and James Sherk of the America First Policy Institute.
Energy also announced that “projects that are likely to retain collective bargaining agreements and/or those that have an existing high-quality, high-wage hourly production workforce” will be more likely to receive higher scores, and therefore more funding, under one of the programs supported by this measure.
So, it’s in the best interest of the UAW to avoid a strike — so that their respective plants can get more funding from this new windfall.
Yet somehow, Granholm says she doesn’t “know that this will have an impact on the collective bargaining.”
To everybody else though, it looks like Biden is trying to grease some palms in hopes of getting that endorsement and support — paid for by you, the taxpayers. And it’s not even guaranteed to protect the jobs of tens of thousands of Americans in the Midwest.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.