Hong Kong Pulls Green Subsidies and Tesla Sales Drop to Zero
Here’s a shocker people in Hong Kong just didn’t want to buy Elon Musk’s over priced cars without government subsidies. Must have made the taxpayers in that industrious city happy to know they were helping the overprivileged show off their environmental conscience.
If you need proof that government subsidies are the only thing propping up the green energy industry, look no further than Hong Kong.
As reported by the Wall Street Journal, newly registered Tesla cars in Hong Kong fell from from 3000 in March, to 0 in April.
Why?
Because Hong Kong stopped providing massive tax breaks to people buying Tesla vehicles. In fact, in April the price of the Tesla Model S four-door car rose from $75,000 to $130,000—a giant 60% increase.
So much for Tesla’s dream of “affordable” electric cars.
Without government subsidies that make their vehicles affordable, Tesla is finished. Even with subsidies, they still manage to lose $13,000 on every car they sell.
Government subsidies keep the green energy industry competitive. Period.
The worst part is that electric cars don’t do much for the environment either. The amount of carbon “saved” by electric vehicles is valued at around $35.
Well at least that doesn’t happen in America our government would never be that wasteful, Oh wait.
For every Tesla car sold (up to No. 200,000), federal taxpayers kick in $7,500 to lower the costs. State taxpayers in a multitude of states pony up still more. In Colorado, they contribute another $5,000 to the electric car kitty, in California, it’s $2,500.
When the Los Angeles Times crunched the numbers two years ago, it found that Tesla buyers had received more than $284 million in federal tax incentives and more than $38 million in California rebates. And that was before Tesla’s banner 2016 year.
The taxpayer help only starts there. Tesla also collects hundreds of millions from competing automakers by selling environmental credits in California and more than half a dozen other states to car companies that can’t meet the states’ “zero emissions” sales mandates.
I wonder if the car companies buying those Zero Emission mandates pass the cost along to the consumer, or if it’s just magically stuck to the man.
Charity Begins at Home, Florida Democrat Passes 1.5 Million Funding Bill For Her Non Profit
If anyone were serious about cleaning up government they could start with non profits.
A Democrat Florida state lawmaker helped pass a bill that allocated $1.5 million to a nonprofit that she founded and pays her a six-figure salary and the state’s Republican governor approved it. The legislator, state Senator Lauren Book, represents south Florida’s Broward county and in 2007 she founded a charity called Lauren’s Kids to educate adults and children about sexual abuse prevention through school curricula, awareness campaigns and speaking engagements.
It’s not just a labor of love for the Florida legislator, who got elected in 2016. As chief executive officer of her charity Book receives a generous $135,000 annual salary, according to a nonprofit investigative journalism conglomerate that broke the story about this outrageous conflict of interest. Since 2012 Lauren’s Kids has received north of $10 million in taxpayer money because the senator’s father, Ron Book, is a prominent lobbyist who happens to be the group’s chairman. In just a few years Lauren’s Kids has “become one of the Florida Legislature’s most favored private charities,” the news article states. Governor Rick Scott, who is in his second term, went along with the $1.5 million appropriation for Book’s charity when he signed Florida’s $83 billion budget recently.
Yeah I know. It’s a non profit that’s meant to prevent sexual abuse of children. How horribly Republican of me to call it into question. It’s not like there is anything really bad here.
As if this weren’t enraging enough, Lauren’s Kids used a chunk of the taxpayer funds it has received to pay a Tallahassee public relations firm millions of dollars, accounting for 28% of its expenses. A follow-up story by the same investigative journalism outlet reveals that the senator’s charity paid Sachs Media Group $3.1 million between 2012 and 2015 as well as a yet-to-be-disclosed amount in 2016. “Millions of taxpayer dollars flowed through the nonprofit to Sachs Media as it both promoted Lauren’s Kids and cultivated Sen. Book’s public persona as a survivor of child sex abuse,” the article states. “Critics say the domination of Lauren’s Kids by the senator and her lobbyist-father raises concerns that the work Sachs Media does is more about making her look good, not raising awareness about unreported cases of child sex abuse.” The founder of the nation’s premier charity watchdog says in the story that “nonprofit money is supposed to be used for a public benefit and not to enhance the aspirations of the charity’s officers.”
So let me get this straight. She was a victim of child abuse at the hands of her nanny now she and her father have turned that abuse into a cottage industry ?
Swedish PM Vows To Force All Priests To Perform Gay Marriages
Well this is what happens when a country can’t hold onto it’s values
Sweden’s Prime Minister has vowed to force all priests working for the Church of Sweden to perform same-sex marriages even if their faith tells them not to.
“No priest in the Swedish Church can refuse to marry same-sex couples” regardless of the priest’s view on the matter, Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said in a recent interview with the Church of Sweden’s newspaper Kyrkans Tidning.
Lofven also supports a motion to only allow priests who agree with same-sex marriage the opportunity to be ordained, according to Breitbart.
Lofven, a Social Democrat, compared priests who refuse to wed same-sex couples with midwives refusing to carry out abortions. “If you are a midwife you either have to carry out abortions, or you have to find another profession. The same goes for priests who do not want to wed homosexuals,” CBN News quoted him as saying based from the interview.
It can happen there, it can happen here. Something to keep in mind.
Quote of the Day
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
H.L. Mencken
Drink up That’s it for the Watercooler today. As always it’s an open thread
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