Trump’s Miracle X-mas Gift: Lower Car Costs

Letter to Ephesians: In this holiday season of miracles perhaps the biggest little one staring at us today is Trump’s ability to slash the cost of owning a stinking car. Tumbling gas prices via more exploration was step one. Eliminating gratuitous auto mandates would be step two.

As the WSJ’s editorial board recently suggested, the latter Trump proposal to “ease mileage mandates that punished gas-car production” will be a game changing follow up to his earlier lifting of many needless regulatory shackles on maximizing old & discovering new gas sources, which has sent prices at the pump tumbling, even below $1.90 in some markets; that is, besides woke California. Argued the editors: “President Trump on Wednesday [also] fulfilled his campaign pledge to end the Biden electric-vehicle mandate. Headlines claim this is ‘rolling back’ fuel-economy standards. No, it’s eliminating gratuitous mandates that raise car prices & create market distortions.” Those standards are not only a “relic” of the Arab oil embargo & gas shortage era but grossly increased under the progressive Obama & Biden administrations under the guise of saving the planet from an impending environmental doomsday. BTW, that End of Times never arrived, while making Elon Musk and EV-makers like Tesla a fortune.

Not that reasonable CAFE aka fuel standards aren’t still being proposed, but those generous EV subsidies that had kept the car sales afloat for over 5 years appear to be endangered. “Sorry, Elon Musk,” the WSJ wrote. Crossover SUVs, which had previously and miraculously been classified as pickup trucks, would also be included in the passenger car bucket going forward, so manufacturers will be hard pressed to keep designing their way around the tougher passenger car standards that remain.

Davd Soul