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View Full Version : NY Federal judge rules Obama's fatwas more powerful than Trump's




Anti Federalist
04-25-2018, 09:41 AM
“Protecting Consumers’ Pocketbooks”

https://www.ericpetersautos.com/2018/04/24/protecting-consumers-pocketbooks/

By eric - April 24, 201818704

A federal appeals court in New York has just decided that cars which federal bureaucrats insist use “too much” gas will be taxed at triple the current rate – in order to punish us for having the effrontery to ignore their fuel-efficient preferences for us.

The tax at issue amounts to an increase from the current $55 applied for each mile-per-gallon less than the federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standard decrees every new car must average to $140 for the same offense – effective beginning with the 2025 model year.

2025 is also the year the CAFE mandatory minimum will ratchet up to 36 MPG from the current 27.5 mandatory minimum.

That means a new car which averages say 28 MPG – which is better mileage than most 2018 model years car average – will cost you $840 more in 2025 than it otherwise would have.

The idea being to discourage you from buying it by punishing you for buying it.

But wait, there’s more.

If the CAFE mandatory minimum rises to 54.5 MPG – as it is on track to do – the punitive tax will soar to almost $3,800 applied to that 28 MPG car.

The idea being to make it impossible for you to buy it.

The Trump administration countermanded these fatwas – which were fatwa’d by the Obama administration – and that was what the court battle was all about. Annoyed bureaucrats and “environmentalists” (a category of mummery of a piece with phrenology) challenged Trump’s challenging of the Obama-era fatwas.

Trump just lost – and thus, so have we.

Our next new car will cost more – unless we buy the kind of car the bureaucrats want us to buy. Smaller ones. More “efficient” ones.

But these cars will cost more, too. Just differently.

There is the obvious cost of complying with the fatwa – which will involve “fuel saving” but cost-adding technology. There is a reason why hybrid and electric cars are more expensive to buy than standard cars.

Turbocharged engines have more parts and so cost more than larger engines without the turbo – which make the same power using fewer parts but use a bit more gas.

Replacing six-speed automatics with one overdrive gear on top with nine and ten speed automatics with 2-3 overdrive gears on top isn’t free, either. Nor direct-injection, ultra-high compression, auto-stop/start systems – etc.

The not-so-obvious cost, though, will be the reduced choices – and the lost capabilities.

Which is the real object of this exercise.

“Gas guzzler” taxes – which have been with us since the ‘70s, always gradually increasing – exist in order to counter our preferences, which government bureaucrats and certain politicians can’t abide. It annoys the American Politburo that the cars which sell best are the cars they like the least – particularly pick-up trucks and SUVs, which for a time got around the CAFE taxes until the Feds changed the regs to encompass them, too.

But the targeted group also includes larger cars with V6 and V8 engines, minivans and crossovers – in a word, vehicles which give ordinary people the attributes they like:

Power, size and capability.

People continue to buy vehicles which provide these things, even at the expense of a few MPGs, rather than micro-engined, micro-cars and electric cars. Which don’t appeal to them nearly as much or make much less economic sense to them.

Else they’d sell.

No one seems to wonder about this.

Never mind.

“Wasteful” vehicles must be taxed “progressively” – in order to make them artificially unaffordable – so that the average person finds it progressively harder to afford them.

The idea isn’t to eliminate them, however.

Just to limit them to the Right Sort of People. Those who can afford the artificially upticked cost. People like New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman – who is no doubt himself a millionaire on the taxpayers’ back. He uttered the following after the court’s verdict was announced.

“The fuel efficiency standards penalty rule is a common sense measure that would protect consumers’ pocketbooks…”

Italics added.

Apparently, “consumers” – a truly loathsome word, suggestive of hogs at the trough – are too dumb to know where their own interests lie. They must be nudged by such as Schneiderman & Co. in the “common sense” direction.

“Consumers” are tricked, you see, into buying vehicles which they don’t really need. Which use “too much” gas. The Evil Car Industry caters to this – damn their eyes.

The Feds – and the courts – to the rescue!

Democracy in Action. As opposed to the actual democracy of people buying what they want.

Of course, what “consumers” should be buying – they just don’t see it – are the small, “fuel efficient” cars and electric cars that Schneiderman & Co. think they ought to buy. Which Schneiderman himself probably is not driving. As the AG of a big state, he is probably driven around in a taxpayer-purchased (and very “gas guzzling”) V8 Tahoe SUV or similar. Just as Soviet Politburo members had their ZIL limousines while the proletariat got Trabants.

If they were lucky.

But never mind.

Some animals are always more equal than others.

fcreature
04-25-2018, 09:51 AM
At what point does the executive just stop paying attention to the dictates of the courts? This is the approach that needs to be taken.

jmdrake
04-25-2018, 11:01 AM
Turbocharged engines have more parts and so cost more than larger engines without the turbo – which make the same power using fewer parts but use a bit more gas.

I recently blew a head gasket and was going to get it repaired but the shop said, because the car was turbo charged, it would cost as much to fix it as it would be to buy another engine. So much for "reduce, reuse, recycle."

Swordsmyth
04-25-2018, 02:05 PM
At what point does the executive just stop paying attention to the dictates of the courts? This is the approach that needs to be taken.

^^^THIS^^^
The other option is for Trump to take this garbage to SCOTUS and for them to put an end to this nonsense of lower courts issuing nationwide rulings.