EV Taxes

There’s a growing movement in the USA at the state level to create new taxes targeting electric vehicles with the intent of reducing or even eliminating them in favor of fossil fuel vehicles. It is part of the general insanity of conservatives that they’ve decided that electric vehicles — which are now generally superior to gasoline and diesel vehicles — are somehow a threat to their conservative ideals. Burning fossil fuels is apparently a manifestation of one’s dominance over nature and other people.

This weird take on electric vehicles points up that very important division between American elites:

On one side, we have the neoliberal futurists, convinced that moving forward with technology and treating market capitalism as a religion (with the invisible hand of the market as its god) will solve all human problems while maintaining an elite (including Musk, Bezos and Gates, but certainly many others) who are somehow better than us despite being clearly morally bankrupt and generally idiotic. They all love Tesla’s ultra-quick luxury cars. They’re less concerned with climate change than they are with achieving the mythic future they’re all way too excited about.

On the other side, with less money but greater numbers, are conservatives, which would be more accurately called neofeudalists, steered by all of the values we associate with fascism: power by any means necessary, a steady stream of blatant lies, open hostility toward democracy, and glorification of a mythic past during which all their perceived enemies either didn’t exist or were under their complete control. They’re the ones who think “rolling coal” is a sign of patriotism and that EV’s are going to make men gay.

(The left is on neither of those sides.)

Below is a video from Transport Evolved where they analyze the bullshit arguments conservatives are promoting to try to convince people to support their plan to tax EV’s out of existence. Transport Evolved has the most grounded and thorough reporting on electric vehicle news that I’ve seen. Transport Evolved certainly has neoliberal politics, but is left of the center-right Democratic party and the luxury EV crowd; they care both about the climate and the ability of normal people to afford reliable transportation.