House Republicans propose to scrap $7,500 electric vehicle credit

Basically the math works like this:

An internal combustion cars cost X tons of carbon to produce. An an EV costs Y tons of carbon to produce. If you need a new car, it will probably require the same amount of carbon to produce an EV as a combustion car. But if you can drive a used car and extend its life 5, 10, 15 years, you save all the carbon of producing the car (which is where the majority of the carbon cost comes from).

> I don't see the issue with rich people benefiting from it, because it's exactly those rich people buying 100K Teslas that are paying for the cost of driving research into better battery technology and cheaper cars so everyone benefits from cleaner air and reduced global warming.

I love investing in technology. However, there's probably more efficient ways of doing it. Every dollar spent to help the rich could have been spent helping the poor, or the environment, or funding research.

1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/which-state-is-a-big-renewable-...

There are many other reports by many other groups...

Also consider the costs of using tax payer money to pay for/subsidies infastructure/reasearch in the fossil fuel industry.

And you can't realistically argue that some endeavors deserve taxpayer support while others have to rely on access to financial markets to get over the hump in their runway. The treasury department should not be picking winners and losers. Leave that to investors that have to put some of their own skin in the game.

The minimum damage to the economy occurs when a tax exactly matches the value of negative externalities pushed out onto the public, to be spent exclusively on cleaning them up, and when a subsidy matches any positive externality that the company hasn't managed to capture yet.

It isn't hard to think that any subsidy for electric vehicles should be scrapped, and within the bounds of the same public concern, replaced with a tax on emissions from combustion vehicles, to be used to make those engines already in service less polluting. The tax phases itself out, as people buy new vehicles that pollute less, and as they make already-paid-for repairs and retrofits on older vehicles.

With the subsidy, you have to turn it off manually whenever the desired economic effect has been achieved.

I have no idea what the motivation is behind subsidizing oil & gas. Encourage people to use engines instead of slave labor? Maybe use gas instead of coal? Whatever the reason is, it may have once favored the best side of a two-sided race, but with additional competitors joining the field, it no longer necessarily helps the best of them. That's why taxing the negative externalities almost always makes more sense, because the tax falls away without further intervention when that competitor exits. Like licensing horses to be inside a municipality, to cover the cost of cleanup when they poop on city streets. When people stop riding into town on horses, and start driving cars, the horse tax goes away without further effort.

There is also the possibility that an industry may never get over the hump in its runway. Do you want to keep it on life support forever? And if not, how do you decide when to pull the plug?