Who Needs A Car, and for What?

Posted on 16/04/2024 by Grumpa Joe

This article. is from the blog “Sultan of Knish”

by Daniel Greenfield

No Cars for the Working Class

The electric streets of La La Land are full of Teslas, Rivians, Mercedes EQS’ and even pricier offerings from the rare earth mines of China. Here a Tesla Cybertruck, looking like a ramp some sportier vehicle will jump, passes Bentleys, canary yellow Lamborghinis and ice blue McLarens.
In the posher parts of California, from Beverly Hills to the Bay Area, the green revolution has come. The ubiquitous EVs charging in the driveways of seven figure mansions are shadowed by solar panels on the roof and sit side by side with signs declaring, “Hate has no home here.”

Neither does affordability.

The vast majority of electric cars, approaching 1 million, can be found in California. Compare that to the paltry 5,000 EVs in Arkansas or even the under 50,000 in a sizable wealthy blue state like Massachusetts. The entire industry of sleek shiny cars that run on batteries only exists because California taxed other car buyers to subsidize Tesla and its emerging counterparts.

California’s heavy subsidies and mild weather, its wealthy cities and conspicuously virtue signaling elites, made EVs possible, and made it impossible for them to evolve outside its warm leftist ecosystem. The vast majority of Californians (like most Americans) can’t afford, can’t use and won’t drive electric cars, but like so much else, the Newsom elites don’t tend to notice.

Electric car owners in California live in “communities with mostly white and Asian, college-educated and high-income residents” who are mostly “concentrated in Silicon Valley cities and affluent coastal areas of Los Angeles and Orange counties.” That’s why most electric cars are luxury SUVs marketed to very exclusive groups in very exclusive areas.

Outside of these enclaves, there isn’t much of an EV industry and there never will be one. Electric cars are not an emerging product, but a niche one as subsidized toys for the rich.

That’s a problem because the Biden administration, like a lot of Democrat states, is moving to ban cars by 2035. It’s one thing for California’s elites to once again disregard over 90% of the state on the assumption that a one-party system and aggressive ballot harvesting can overcome most obstacles, but the car bans have also extended to Maryland (46,060 EVs with 0.91%), Massachusetts (49,440 EVs and 0.91%), Connecticut (22,030 EVs and 0.75%), Oregon (46,980 EVs and 1.24%) and New York (84,670 EVs and 0.75%) among other blue states.

How do you get from those numbers to total adoption in a little over a decade? You don’t.

The assumption that most car owners would drink the Electric Vehicle Kool Aid and jump on board ignored the basic realities of energy, engineering and economics. There isn’t enough power, materials or money to make 2035 anything other than a political four-car pileup.

GM and Ford have lost billions trying to push electric cars. GM promised to sell 1 million EVs by 2025. In the first quarter of 20244, it sold 16,425 EVs. A year from now, it will need to have sold 250,000 of them. How is GM planning to get from 16,425 to 250,000 EVs sold? GM is bragging about the Cadillac LYRIQ. Last December, GM shut down production of the Chevy Bolt which ran to $26,000 and, unlike the LYRIQ, was too affordable and therefore not actually profitable.

GM is hoping that the Cadillac LYRIQ will tap into the same luxury EV market that Tesla, Mercedes and every EV SUV is already aimed at, but as usual it may be too late to the party Even liberal millionaires who care so much about the planet that they fly private jets to Tahiti to reconnect with nature at their second or third homes only need so many green cars.

Or as Edmunds’ Director of Insights Ivan Drury put it, most of those concerned about internal-combustion engines’ impact on the planet already bought electric vehicles.

The latest Gallup poll shows that the number of electric car owners slowly grew, but that those people are wealthy and most already have their cars. 7% of Americans now own an EV, only 9% would consider buying and 48% or half the country would not buy.

Who are these electric refusniks who won’t drink the electric kool-aid? The working class.

14% of EV owners are upper income while only 2% are working class. 61% of working class Americans won’t buy an electric car.

Lefties who can see income inequality and disproportionate impact everywhere carefully refuse to see it in their policies which would bar the majority of the country and most minorities from car ownership. A 2020 survey found that 87% of EV owners are white. In a 2023 survey, black people were the most likely of any group to say that they would not get an EV.

After decades of lecturing everyone about systemic racism, capitalism and the evils of white men, a group of rich white people have decided to make it impossible for minorities and the poor to buy new cars. But what’s a little systemic racism when it means enriching China to save the planet from the threat of cars whose components can actually be made in America?

While Secretary of Transportation in Absentia Pete Buttigieg scolds the “racist highways”, his administration is pulling off the single great example of disproportionate impact in generations. The average price of an EV is $53,469 and the average black household income is $41,500 while the average white household income is $68,000. You can still get a perfectly good family car for only $20,000, but good luck finding an EV that isn’t actively on fire in that price range.

A policy of no cars for the working class or minorities may be a little bit awkward, but in the electric kool-aid world, much like the Mercedes EQS and the Chevy Bolt, not all people or cars are created equal, and not all people should be allowed to own cars. Most actually shouldn’t.

Environmentalism ushers in a neo-feudalism in which things have to be taken away from us to save the planet. And the people most likely to feel the loss are those at the bottom.

Hike the price of cars by $15,000 and the ones most likely to notice are those for whom that isn’t a monthly paycheck, but much of their annual income. Raise the price of airline tickets to compensate for carbon footprints and it’s the poor who won’t be able to visit grandma. Nickel and dime everything from supermarket bags to soda bottles and it’s a regressive green tax.

Much of the green nickel and diming is invisible. Prices just go up a little bit on everything. But lefties have put the working class on a collision course with mobility, employment and independence. A car ban is not like a lightbulb ban or even a gas stove ban.

Americans used to love cars because they were freedom on wheels. Decades of regulations and cheap imports from Asia have turned the driving experience for most Americans into a series of warning beeps, government tracking devices, and warnings not to do this and that, while slowly inching along in one of several semi-identical white, black or dark black boxes.

And now even that is on the verge of disappearing.

A car ban means most Americans will not be able to own, they will lease. American car ownership, like free speech and every other form of freedom, will become a distant memory.

Unless the drivers of America outrun the EV banners of the Biden administration leaving them behind like Sheriff Buford T. Justice or Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane eating their non-green dust.

Filed under: Conservative, Education, Government | Tagged: , , | 1 Comment »

Retire from Retirement

Posted on 14/04/2024 by Grumpa Joe

I’m just sitting here talking to myself and thinking how easy it is to critique someone’s work than it is to do the actual work. Writing a book is a lot harder than reading a book, but criticizing a book is a lot easier than readng it. Enjoying a good movie or video is a lot easier than making it. Editing a book is harder than reading it. I am learning that getting an idea to write a book is a lot easier than writing a book. In my current work, I got a single idea of what I wanted a story to be about, but developing that idea into a full fledged story is another matter. An idea can sometimes be expressed in a few words or sentences, but developing that same idea and expanding it into a hundred thousand word story becomes work.

I enjoy a good story with solid characters and a good plot. In my story, I’m not sure I am doing enough to develop strong characters, and the plot seems to be weak. When writing, the principal thing to remember is to show the story and not tell the story. I am great at telling stories but weak at showing them. In fact, it took me a long time to know the difference between the two. By the time I learn that difference and apply it to my writing, I’m afraid my body clock will have worn out.

I often wonder how many books being written actually get published and how many of those that get published make money. What I do know is that the time I spend on writing a post or a story that it really isn’t worth the effort in income production. If I stood on a street corner holding a sign saying, “Please help a starving writer,” I think I would make more money than I would if I had published a book.

Even with all the ways I can think of to avoid wasting my time writing, I am determined to complete the work and send it off to a publisher. One way to tell if your time was worth it is if it is actually published. The second way is to make money on it. If you make some money, it is the measure of the story’s success.

If my book is published and it does make some money, then maybe, I can retire from being retired.

Filed under: Education, Motivation, Writer | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »

Someone Who Understands Me

Posted on 11/04/2024 by Grumpa Joe

Those who know me understand that I have a negative view of teacher’s unions. I have never been a teacher, nor have I attended a school that was run by a union. Regardless, I hate unions in general. When it comes to student outcomes, I especially dislike Teacher Unions.

The article below is taken from the BLOG “Sultan Knish the Journalism of Daniel Greenfield.”

Once again, Greenfield exposes the facts that support my own feelings.

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The More Powerful the Teachers Union, the less the Children Learned

The Biden administration is on a hunt for systemic racism. Thus far it’s found systemic racism everywhere from the highway system to the military, but the one place it hasn’t looked is among the ranks of the teachers unions who provide much of its cash and its election foot soldiers.

But new data reported by the New York Times shows that the pandemic school closures demanded by teachers unions were the single greatest act of systemic racism in 50 years.

During the pandemic, members of the corrupt teachers union machine demanded school closures to “save lives”. Unwilling to do their jobs, they instead marched around brandishing coffins at political protests while warning that if they had to go and teach, everyone would die.

Education was replaced with the Orwellian misnomer of “remote learning” which parents, students and honest teachers admitted was not actually teaching any of the students anything.

And the newest data backs that up, showing that “in districts where students spent most of the 2020-21 school year learning remotely, they fell more than half a grade behind in math.”

The numbers were even worse for the poorer students who fell behind three fifths of a grade.

The decline in math scores was the worst in 50 years making it a historic setback and while all students suffered during the pandemic, the learning experiences in districts where schools shut were far worse for poorer students, often minorities, than for wealthy or middle class students.

And while the DEI complex and the media have spent years talking about disproportionate impact, it was the Left which was responsible for the worst disproportionate impact in 50 years.

And therefore for the “systemic racism” that they had selfishly brought into being.

Previous figures showed a “larger score gap between white and black students nationally—from 25 points in 2020 to 33 points in 2022.” Fourth grade math scores fell twice as much for black and Hispanic students as for white students. While we already knew that minority students fell back further during the pandemic, the new numbers compare the schools that stayed open and those that closed in order to pander to teachers union members who refused to come to work.

“More time spent in remote or hybrid instruction in the 2020-21 school year was associated with larger drops in test scores,” the Times analysis showed. “Students that were offered a hybrid schedule (a few hours or days a week in person, with the rest online) did better, on average, than those in places where school was fully remote, but worse than those in places that had school fully in person.”

The media had accused Georgia, Florida and other states that opened up of conducting experiments in “human sacrifice”. The actual human sacrifice was carried out by Democrats and their educational establishment which brought up children as human sacrifices to the unions.

Teachers unions waged a relentless and ruthless war to close schools and keep them closed.

American Federation of Teachers (AFT) boss Randi Weingarten called reopening schools “reckless, callous, cruel”. Union members protested, threatened, sued and even physically blocked schools from reopening. The teachers unions won while students and parents lost.

Rep. Aaron Bean noted that “school districts with lengthier collective bargaining agreements were less likely to start the fall 2020 semester with in-person instruction.” Surveys found that the more powerful the teachers unions were, the more likely schools were to stay closed.

And therefore, the more powerful the teachers union, the less the children learned.

Teachers unions chose not to work and they leveraged school reopenings to extract personal and political benefits without paying any price for it. That is true of the lockdown advocates nearly across the board, but the teachers unions emerged politically stronger than ever from the educational disaster they had helped to cause. Strikes, slowdowns and elections made them wealthier and more powerful. And they continue to grow more powerful every year.

As late as 2022, 73% of the members of the Chicago Teachers Union voted not to come to work while claiming that COVID-19 was still too dangerous. A year later, CTU organizer Brandon Johnson was elected as the 57th mayor of Chicago.

What happened during the pandemic was not a unique event, it just accelerated the current state of affairs in which teachers unions have wielded their political power to demand more money for less work while dismantling all the basic standards of the educational system.

According to teachers unions, the ideal educational system has no test scores and no expectations but that students be taught to parrot the politics of their teachers.

The price for the dismantling of the educational system by the educators, during the pandemic or the rest of the time, is being paid by students. Especially poor and minority students.

Teachers unions claim that they advocate for students and that when they wield power, they do so to improve educational outcomes. The data, not only during the pandemic, proves otherwise.

In 1960, the American Federation of Teachers had a mere 60,000 members. Today it’s 1.7 million. And students are less capable of reading, study less and know less than their peers in 1960, but receive much higher grades than they did 60 years ago.

What has improved in schools since 1960 are the teacher salaries, by “45 percent in real terms”, so that teachers union members, like other government workers, are outperforming the taxpayers who pay their salaries.

The growth of the teachers unions has been great for teachers, but terrible for students.

The pandemic brought home the consequences to many parents and the years since convinced many that the public school system, fatally corrupted by teachers unions, is incapable of reform. That’s why movements such as homeschooling and school choice continue to grow, not just for the stereotypical conservatives, but for a spectrum of parents, many of them minorities.

Restoring public education will require many reforms, but the most fundamental of these will be ending the death grip that the teachers unions have over the nation’s students.

Filed under: Aging, Education, family | Tagged: , , | 1 Comment »

PSA-240409-Things to Ponder

Posted on 09/04/2024 by Grumpa Joe

           Things You Learn if You Live Long Enough!

I choked on a carrot this morning, and all I could think of was, “I’ll bet a doughnut wouldn’t have done this to me.”

Nothing spoils a good story more than the arrival of an eye witness.  (Mark Twain)

It only takes one slow-walking person in the grocery store to destroy the illusion that I’m a nice person.

It turns out that when asked who your favorite child is, you’re supposed to pick out one of your own.  I know that now.

It’s fine to eat a test grape in the produce section, but you take one bite of rotisserie  chicken and then it’s  “Sir, you need to leave!”

One thing no one ever talks about, when it comes to being an older adult, is how  much time we devote to keeping a cardboard box because it is, you know, a really good box.

I can’t believe I forgot to go to the gym today.  That’s seven years in a row, now.

If you drop something when you were younger, you just picked it up.  When you’re older and you drop something, you stare at it for  just a bit contemplating if  you actually need it anymore.

I like to make lists.  I also like to leave them laying on the kitchen counter, and then guess what’s on the list when I am at the store.

Ask your doctor if a drug with 32 pages of side-effects is bad for you.

I just read a book about marriage that says treat your wife like  you treated her on your first date.  So tonight after dinner I’m dropping her off at her parent’s house.

The best way to get back on your feet is to miss two car payments.

I love bacon.  Sometimes I eat it twice a day.  It takes my mind off the terrible chest pains I keep getting.

As I watch this generation try to rewrite history, one thing I am sure of is that it will be misspelled and have no punctuation.

Driver:  “What am I supposed to do with this speeding ticket?”  Officer, “Keep it. When you collect four of them, you get a bicycle.

I asked a supermarket employee where they kept the canned peaches.

He said, “I’ll see,” & walked away.  I asked another & he also said, “I’ll see,” & walked away.  In the end, I gave up & found them myself, in Aisle C.

I told my physical therapist that I broke my arm in two (2) places.He told me to stop going to those places.

I put our scale in the bathroom corner & that’s where the little liar will stay until it apologizes.

When I was a kid, I used to watch the ‘Wizard of Oz’ & wonder how someone could talk if they didn’t have a brain. Then I got Facebook.

 Do you ever get up in the morning, look in the mirror & think, “That can’t be accurate!”

I want to be 14 again & ruin my life differently. I have new ideas.

Apparently RSVP’ing to a wedding invitation with “Maybe next time” isn’t the correct response.

A guy walks into a lumberyard & asks for some 2x4s.  The clerk asks, “How long do you need them?  The guy answers, “A long time. We’re gonna build a house.”

I just burned 1,200 calories.   I forgot the pizza in the oven.

Who knew that the hardest thing of being an adult is figuring out what to fix for dinner and doing it every single night for the rest of  your life until you die?

I hate it when people act all intellectual and talk about Mozart, when they’ve never even seen one of  his paintings.

Never trust an electrician with no eye brows.

So my neighbor knocked on my front door at 3 am.  3AM!!!  Luckily I was already up playing my bagpipes.

Instead of cleaning my house, I just watch an episode of “The Hoarders,” and think, “Wow!  My house looks great.”

Filed under: Aging, Humor, Seniors | Tagged: , , | 5 Comments »

Divided We Fall

Posted on 07/04/2024 by Grumpa Joe

This is one of those days when I don’t have anything to write about. So, I’ll resort to beginning with words that might not make sense at the start but may mean something by the time I finish. When I experienced my greatest readership a few years ago, I was writing opinion pieces about Obama. At the time, I thought he was a born-in-Africa communist dressed in Brooks Brothers suits and pretending to love this country. Today, I am quite certain that he is a communist born in Kenya. He was hell bent on implementing his communist father’s proposal to redistribute the wealth of America, and dividing the country into hate groups. The President of Kenya hired him, and promptly fired him when Daddy Obama began to propose his plan to take from the rich to feed the poor.

The hate groups BO tickled into functioning were not just black vs white, they were Muslims against Christians, queers against straight, Europe against Russia, the world against China, etc. the list is endless. There is more division in America today than there has ever been among peoples of the world since the beginning of time. He couldn’t accomplish the deed while in office illegally, so helped steal the last election from Trump, his greatest enemy, for a candidate that he himself believes to be a dimwit. He knew he could control the dimwit from within the depths of the Deep State bureaucracy.

During his presidency, Obama was afraid he might be exposed as a charlatan if he pushed the radical left too hard to bankrupt America. In walks the dimwit, who immediately erased every positive move Trump made while in office, he ignored all existing laws, and proceeded to open the border to allow millions of unvetted immigrants to cross. The dimwit then bussed, flew, and transported them to unidentified cities across the country and assured them that America would care for them with free stuff. At the same time, dimwit began a deep-state war against Trump to ensure that his innovative ideas to save the country will never happen. In effect, Obama granted himself a third term as president.

We all know that Obama was elected under the guise of affirmative action. We needed a black president to cool the 20 percent of the population that feels they need a savior to lead them to the promised land. The promised land where they can live happily ever after, stealing people’s stuff and shooting each other at will. I feel sorry for the blacks who live righteous lives, and I despise the blacks who are spoiling life for their brothers and sisters. Obama and dimwit will label me a racist for saying that.

We are a nation with our heads in the sand regarding placing blame where it belongs. The powers that be ignore that the lousy education system is the result of teacher unions that are more interested in making a fortune for doing nothing than in taking responsibility for poor educational outcomes. The Congress is responsible for drafting and passing stupid laws creating a culture of black families without fathers. Congress is responsible for never repealing stupid laws only making them more stupid by amending them with more complicated twists, turns, and loop holes. Congress is also responsible for abdicating to the lobby industry all responsibility to write laws. Congress, then fills the lobby written laws with pages full of porky earmarks that help them get re-elected. When will the common man be allowed to lobby a congressman to write laws that make sense and might even work? The DOJ must be renamed to the Department of Injustice for dividing law against order.

Our government does not work the way the Founding Fathers envisioned it. For one thing, I’m positive that George Washington and his cabinet did not envision the mess we have brought upon ourselves. The first immigration law was passed in 1892 and has been enhanced, improved, and complicated at least ten more times since its inception. The number of people working for all the immigration services has changed from 180 in 1891 to about 320,000 in 2024. Politicians love to blame every problem at the border on our “broken” immigration system. The problem as I see it is that they have so much help and so many conflicting policies that they are tripping over themselves trying to get the job done.

My personal experience with immigration came when I offered to help an immigrant who has lived in America for over twenty years but is not considered ‘legal’. I couldn’t live with that, so I made it my responsibility to get the immigrant processed as quickly as possible. To date, it has cost nearly ten thousand dollars, and it has been three years in the making, but still no Green Card. There is no estimate for how long the process will take. Most of the cost is for processing fees. The excuse I get is that the Law makes the immigrant responsible for the cost of his becoming ‘legal’. I see a future in this racket for immigration attorneys who specialize in understanding the laws and its loopholes. And there are loopholes a many. In trying to understand how complicated the system is I have visited the USCIS website many times and have learned that there are over 500 different forms that pertain to the laws with provisions for loop holes in each. Depending on an immigrant’s specific situation decides which form is used to use. After examining several of them I learned that the government is paranoid about anyone telling a lie on a form. Each form has a half page codicil of fine print explaining the penalty for lying on an application. Most penalties are jail, deportation, and/or fines.

My question is this: how many years will it take to:

1.) Find ten million people who have entered the country in the past three years without the necessary paperwork?

2.) How long will it be before these people achieve legal status?

While we await the answer to those questions Congress, no doubt, will spend its time drafting new revisions and laws to make the processing more complicated. They will then spend endless hours on TV news programs explaining how these new laws make us more secure than the previous law did.

Hopefully, I fulfilled my promise at the beginning by delivering final words that make sense.

Filed under: Conservative, Government, Immigration | Tagged: , , , | Leave a comment »

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