Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg:
Buttigieg says you don’t have to worry about gas prices if you buy an electric vehicle…someone should remind him how out of touch he sounds pic.twitter.com/tiJVkl7wB3
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) March 7, 2022
TV comedian Stephen Colbert:
.@StephenAtHome: "Today, the average gas price in America hit an all-time record high of over $4/gallon. OK, that stings, but a clean conscience is worth a buck or two. It’s important. I’m willing to pay $4/gallon. Hell, I’ll pay $15 a gallon b/c I drive a Tesla" pic.twitter.com/my8Ukya5rQ
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) March 8, 2022
The latter is more interesting because The Late Show is supposed to be comedy for the people. Public airwaves TV.
Yet Colbert is just as much of a sneering elitist as Buttigieg.
These people hate us.
They feel deep in their bones that they are better than us.
They yearn for the days if monarchies, where those at the top had unlimited wealth and power and ruled by divine right, while those below them were just obedient peasants and serfs.
The idea of America, that all men are created equal and all citizens are entitled to earn a quality life without their station of birth defining them. They find this idea offensive.
It is not enough they they are rich, they need us to be poor.
If they are rich but we’re doing well, we have no impetus to be obedient serfs.
They need us to be peasants, ground into the mud, to make themselves feel more like kings.
Notice that wealth inequality increases wherever they have power.
That is why this talking point.
If you can react to $5 gas by buying a $60,000 Tesla, you are one of them. If not, you are in the peasant class.
Things are not getting worse by accident or incompetence.
They are getting worse through maliciousness.
This is their revenge for America electing Trump in 2016 and thinking that life should be good for middle-class middle Americans and not just the connected rich.
They hate us and the feeling is mutual.
They also live in tightly packed urban areas where a ‘long’ drive involves 10 miles but an hour+ of traffic. The peasants don’t ‘need’ cars there. They can take public transportation or call an uber/taxi.
No thought to the 95% rest of the land area of the US where there’s limited public transportation, no charging stations, and a long drive involves 60+ miles (but still only takes an hour). This is also the same demographic that thinks getting rid of pickup trucks is a great idea because only ‘farmers’ might need them.
“They also live in tightly packed urban areas…”
Which means they’ll be the first ones to experience Russia’s canned sunshine when the Pederast in Chief gets us into WW3.
I believe Tesla is changing battery chemistry for the standard range vehicles to lithium-iron-phosphate, but the long range packs still use nickel-cobalt-aluminum cells. How’s that working out?
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/08/russia-nickel-trading-suspended-in-london-after-prices-hit-100000.html
Nailed it J.Kb. The Clinton-Obama machine, and supporting members, both national and global, of that machine, are indeed punishing non-Clinton, non-Obama, and non-Biden Americans, acting behind Biden—using him as a distraction…as Obama said he loved to do…”pissing the white folks off” and fundamentally changing their “Greatest country in the world”.
I believe that Putin is working in concert with the Clinton-Obama agenda, which has the purpose of collapsing the US Economy and stressing an already divided and weakened constitutional republic. They no longer fear elections, because they have a failproof method of changing the outcome if needed. What happened in 2020 was the most brilliant war strategy I have ever studied–create a virus in order to justify an unconstitutional mail-in ballot which can’t be verified or unverified in any US court of law. They knew they needed 42,000 votes in six swing states to change the opposition’s election victory. And circumventing the 12th Amendment via a staged January 6 insurrection on the day of elector certification, sealed their victory. They bypassed the Electoral College system and broke the designed stranglehold it had on the democratic process of mob-rule.
I don’t believe there is any chance of coming back from this as a nation.
“It is not enough they they are rich, they need us to be poor.”
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Not sure I agree. I do not really think they care. In fact, what the effect is on other people does not enter their thought processes. They can afford higher gas prices, so if you complain, you are just being greedy and trying to destroy the planet.
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Additionally, these morons do not understand everything is all one massive interconnected system. Change fuel prices, raise taxes, increase minimum wage, etc… and the cost of everything goes up. They will then complain that medical care is too expensive, and that people are dying because it costs too much to get them drugs or treatments, whatever.
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Because they are convinced that higher gas prices will have no effect because they can afford it.
They need to think this over. Not that I expect them to.
Those people they hate may not be able to buy a $60k Tesla, but they might be able to buy a $1500 rifle.
And at that point things get interesting.
There is money to be made, and power to be grabbed by pandering to imbeciles.
Biden just stumbled through an announcement about the US banning Russian Oil.
He took no questions from the press.
Meanwhile in Germany: electric car owners feel fucked because the charging rates are so high that it’s more expensive per km to charge your car than to fill the tank – and we’re over 2€/l for gasoline!
Only if you can charge via flat rates you can drive economically.
Even by the Buttigieg standards of epic stupidity this is more stupid than usual. An obvious issue is that only a small fraction of vehicle fuel consumption is by sedans that could be replaced by Teslas. Electric cars aren’t helpful if you’re a contractor driving a van, a delivery truck driver, a long haul owner-operator, or a farmer running a combine. For that matter, electric vehicle technology isn’t relevant if you’re flying an airplane, nor if you’re operating a freight train.
Apart from that, the issue is inflation. Electric rates are subject to inflation, too, and if that hasn’t become obvious yet it will soon.
Weasel, that’s amazing. In NH, which has high electric rates by US standards, and moderate fuel prices, my S is cost-competitive (in energy costs, not depreciation of course) with an IC car doing 60 mpg.
Electric rates in the Pacific Northwest range from 3 cents per kwh to about 11 cents.
Electric vehicles make sense here, but only because of hydro power.
Thinking about today’s announcement, I have a cynical view. Biden doesn’t really care about Ukraine. He worries a fair amount about rapidly rising gas prices that imperil his party, but he’s far more frightened of the crazy socialist wing of his party. So he doesn’t want to fix the gas price problem.
Now here comes a lovely opportunity. He can store feel-good points while at the same time shifting blame for rising prices to Putin. Of course, anyone with a functioning brain can see this is a crummy excuse rather than reality, but hey, it’s worth a try, right? Anything that doesn’t involve actually solving the problem and getting AOC mad at him.