If you just parachuted into the United States from another planet (unlike the millions of illegal aliens from this planet simply marching across the border at the encouragement of Democrats), upon first glimpse, you might think our government is efficient and excellent at managing our resources. You would, of course, be insane to think that, and coming from another planet, or maybe out from under a rock for a long time, is just about the only way in which anyone could. It turns out, judging by the insanity of what our government does on a regular basis and on a massive scale, a lot of people might be from another planet or living under rocks.
Tesla is the undisputed king of electric vehicles, it’s not even close. But they’d be worthless were owners not able to charge their batteries. As pretty as the cars are, there aren’t many people willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a pretty paperweight.
With that in mind, Tesla built and installed tens of thousands of charging stations, not only across the country but around the world. Without them, their product wouldn’t be a luxury, it’d be a vanity project.
The federal government is hoping to mandate that everyone buy electric vehicles in just a few years. Since the only way to make that appealing and practical would be to have charging stations as ubiquitous as gas stations, the Biden administration has earmarked billions in tax dollars to build them.
So far, the administration has spent $7.5 billion and only produced a grand total of 7 stations. That level of inefficiency seems impossible to achieve by trying, but government gets there without breaking a sweat.
This should surprise no one. In January, the Associated Press reported, “The Biden administration is awarding $623 million in grants to states, local governments and tribes to help build an electric vehicle charging network across the nation. Grants announced Thursday will fund 47 EV charging stations and related projects in 22 states and Puerto Rico.” That breaks down to $13,255,319.10 per station, if you ignore whatever constitutes “related projects” and assume all the money goes to the stations.
That’s a lot of money for a few plugs.
Needless to say, Tesla pays a lot less than that for their superchargers. Of course, it’s their money, whereas the government is spending ours – Tesla is accountable to shareholders, the government is accountable to no one.
The federal government, especially when led by Democrats, has to do something especially horrible or incompetent to fall under criticism of Jon Stewart.
Imagine if you bought a Tesla Cybertruck for $100,000 and it didn’t work, not because you did something wrong, but because the software they installed didn’t work. You’d expect them to fix it immediately or give you a refund, right?
If you’re the federal government, paying for that Tesla with our money, you simply keep sending Tesla money and get nothing in return.
I don’t mean to pick on Tesla here, they didn’t do this, but our government did.
The Pentagon has spent $2 trillion on a fighter jet called the F-35. I’m all for our military having state of the art fighter jets, but by “state of the art” I mean ones that actually fly. You wouldn’t think that would require clarification, but it does. Because the F-35 has been a complete failure so far, and there is no end in sight for the money pit.
Normal people would cut bait or at least fire their contractor if they kept throwing good money after bad on a project with absolutely no progress being made. But that’s not how government contracting works.
The F-35 is grounded because the most advanced fighter jet ever constructed can’t work because the company building it can’t make the software that runs it work. Comedian Stewart, a dedicated liberal, had to laugh about this, saying on his podcast, “We had a child tax credit that cost $94 billion… that reduced child poverty by 30%. We couldn’t keep that going as a country and yet we have this $1.7 trillion boondoggle, and they can’t, what, get the sonos to work it?” he said. “Like, the software doesn’t work…that’s insanity!”
Lockheed Martin, the company making a fortune producing plane-shaped paperweights is promising to have new software ready to go…next year. It was supposed to be this year, around now, but meh. When there is zero chance of accountability and the Secretary of Defense has no interest in firing you, why worry?
To find any of this acceptable, forget having lived under a rock, you would have had to have been hit in the head with one. Yet, this is how our government operates regularly. These examples are but two, and particularly egregious ones in recent history. Our government regularly does such corruption and incompetences on a much smaller scale, but it all adds up. For us, anyway, they always walk away unimpacted. It’s good to be a bureaucrat.
Derek Hunter is the host of a free daily podcast (subscribe!) and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses, and host of the weekly “Week in F*cking Review” podcast where the news is spoken about the way it deserves to be. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.