Where Best To Spend Taxpayer Money - Detroit or Helsinki?

Just when you think it cannot get any more stupid and insane, you get surprised by the American political class. The October 9, 2009 issue of the The Week magazine (http://www.theweek.com/) quotes an article from the New York Times that reports on a $529 million US government loan that has been made to a California startup company, Fisker Automotive. According to the Times article, the loan is for Fisker to build a hybrid sports car with a retail price of $89,000. The truly insulting part of the whole loan deal is that the car will be manufactured in Finland! Think about how many ways this is such a lame decision:

• With Detroit facing an unemployment rate of almost 30% and the US car industry under incredible strain due to foreign imports, whose bright idea in the government was it to loan someone more than a half a billion dollars to manufacture cars in Finland?
• If hybrids are so important to our country's future energy conservation needs and the potential need to reduce our carbon footprint, shouldn't these funds have been invested domestically to develop the manufacturing skill base we need in this country and not in Finland?
• Who in this country, with unemployment levels about to go over 10%, would have the money to buy an $89,00 vehicle? Not many.
• Couldn't these funds have been better used to provide retraining programs for unemployed U.S. automotive workers in order to get them back on their feet?
• Let's do some math: according to the online version of the Wall Street Journal, U.S. auto and light truck sales through the end of September were about 10 million units. If we assume the last three months of the year will have the same rate of sales, annual 2009 sales will be about 13.3 million units. According to the Fisker website, they expect to eventually sell 15,000 units on an annual basis. If ALL of them come to the United States, 15,000 units on a base of 13.3 million units comes out to about .1% of the market. At this rate these volumes will have virtually no impact on global warming, carbon footprint, etc.

So let's summarize: U.S taxpayer dollars are going overseas as the deficit soars, new skills are being developed overseas and not in our own factories and with our own workforce, an end product will result that will benefit only the rich due to the high price although all taxpayers, rich and poor, will contribute to its development, and a global warming impact of next to zero. What a stupid, wasteful idea.

Oh, did I mention that Al Gore is one of the investors in Fisker? Want to bet Al makes out like a bandit with half a billion taxpayer dollars in his Fisker pocket? The audacity of such wasteful spending unbelievable. Another example of the political class taking care of its own at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer.