“Green” = rob from the poor and give to the rich?

Dennis Moore, Dennis Moore
Riding through the land
Dennis Moore, Dennis Moore
Without a merry band
He steals from the poor
And gives to the rich.

- Monty Python’s Flying Circus

The Chevy Volt. Electric car. Mostly. Costs $41,000. Wow that’s expensive. No average American can afford to buy that. But wait! The government provides a whopping $7,500 subsidy to offset that cost. So now it only costs $33,500.

The general rule of thumb is you can afford a car that is up to 1/3 your income. So the only people who can reasonably afford a Chevy Volt – with the subsidy – are those who make more than $101,500 per year.

And where does that $7,500 subsidy come from? Taxpayers like me. Who cannot afford a Chevy Volt with or without the subsidy.

Jonah Goldberg outlines brilliantly the absurdities in his recent article “Low Volt-age”:

“Like the EV1 that GM tried to peddle in the California market,” Kenneth Green, an environmental scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, says, “the Volt is a vanity car for the well-off that will be subsidized by less well-off taxpayers at all stages, from R&D to sales and to the construction of charging stations.”

So upscale urban liberals – an important base of support for President Obama – can not only purchase the Volt to show off how environmentally conscious they are. (And who would care? Not me.) They can do so at the expense of taxpayers who cannot afford one.

I would love to buy a hybrid. Not just for the killer gas mileage. Certainly not for any real savings in money – it takes years to make up the difference in cost over a conventional vehicle. But just the principle of it. Use less petroleum which is a finite and diminishing resource? Yes please.

But the dirty little secret of going green is that it’s expensive. The average American cannot afford many of the changes that going green can involve. I remember an article in the Baton Rouge Advocate about 2-3 years ago about a couple who redesigned their house so that they would not have to use air conditioning in the summer. You know. Better insulation. Adding new windows to get cross breezes going. That sort of thing. You know what it cost them?

$150,000.

That’s more than the value of my home.

I think what they did is great. I would like to do that for my house. But I can’t afford it.

I was not planning to post about this. But had an interesting conversation last Friday during English Conversation that set me thinking.

The host is a contractor. Great guy. He apparently ran into someone who knows me. Stan Zamek and his family – visited them in Hong Kong – are in the States for a few weeks and stopped in Baton Rouge to visit friends.

Why was my host friend over there? To install some solar panels.

How much? $70,000. Wow that’s a lot of money. Yeah but they get a tax credit? rebate? that covers eighty percent of the cost. So they only spend $14,000. No more electric bills. The panels generate everything the house needs.

That’s the same day Jonah Goldberg wrote that brilliant piece on the Chevy Voltswagen.

It got me thinking. Who pays that eighty percent of the cost of their super cool solar panels? Why – we do. The average American taxpayer. And who has enough money up front to install those solar panels? Average American taxpayers? Nope – only people with higher incomes.

I would like to install solar panels on my own house. But I don’t see how we could come up with $50,000(?) to do it. And do we really want to ask fellow Americans to subsidize eighty percent of that cost?

How many other examples are there? “Make this change to your home or your lifestyle. If you do there is a credit/rebate from the state/federal government”. But even with the credit/rebate it is expensive.

My family was one of the first and only in our small Massachusetts town to have solar water heating back in the late 1970′s. I was and remain proud of this. But now I realize that other people paid for our pride.

Going green is great. Hybrids and solar panels and all the rest! And maybe the government should encourage such moves with credits/rebates. That is not necessarily the issue here. What troubles me is the apparent pattern. Average Americans helping pay for green changes that only wealthier people can afford.