July 16, 2010

Oz had its own version of Obama, sort of...

Australia just ousted a Prime Minister who had a few Obama-like traits. For example, he decided [!] that Australia needed to build and sell more hybrid cars. So he induced his party to set up a program to "encourage" that goal. Initial budget: half a billion dollars.

Car-making giant Toyota was given about $70 million of that fund to build a hybrid in Oz.

As of a couple of weeks ago, they'd sold less than 700. If you're curious, that works out to a taxpayer-funded subsidy of $100,000 per vehicle.

In fairness, they had projected sales of 3000 by this time. If they'd achieved that figure it would have dropped the per-car subsidy to a measly $20,000 or so.

Now compare that to Obama's and the Dems' latest canny bidness venture in the battery factory in Michigan (see above), where U.S. taxpayers ended up paying $151 million to employ 300 workers--a cool half-million bucks per job!

Hey, U-S-A ! U-S-A ! We'll show those piker Aussies, eh?

Wait...What?


It appears that all governments routinely make terrible decisions. But when it comes to anticipating market trends or consumer preferences, bureaucrats--and Congresscritters, and present-ents-- make even worse decisions than usual.

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