Maybe you drive a larger vehicle because you need the extra room; perhaps it makes you feel safer on the road, or maybe you just like the features it offers. We don’t really care; and our point is, neither should the government.
But Obama has now quietly signed into law a new environmental regulation that will add at least $2,000 to the cost of each vehicle you purchase, and will force auto manufacturers to make cars smaller and less safe on our roadways.
On Tuesday, while you were going about your business and paying attention to Hurricane Isaac and the Republican National Convention, Obama enacted his new “car tax,” which he describes as “historic.”
It’s historic, all right. The government is now in charge of what we drive.
What Obama has done is tinker with Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, a plan that will cost up to $157 billion in the push to double the fuel efficiency of cars by 2025.
What it is, in fact, is a giant regulatory burden and “green” initiative that will interfere with our free market, punish businesses and limit consumer choice.
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) put a statement on his panel’s website, “The rule finalized today by the Obama Administration will hurt American consumers by forcing them to drive more expensive and less safe automobiles. The Administration drafted these standards in secret, strong-arming automakers and short-circuiting the deliberative regulatory process to achieve a purely political result, abandoning sound science and objectivity to appease its political allies in the extreme environmentalist lobby.”
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The current CAFE standard is 30.2mpg; Obama’s new rule will require automakers to reach 55.4mpg. He says it will save consumers money. Whenever the government claims it has done a calculation that will save you money, hide your wallet.
But worse yet, studies over the past decade have shown that these new fuel efficiency standards are expensive and deadly.
The liberal party of death must figure if going green means losing a few lives so be it. Consider the evidence against previous CAFE standards, not taking into account the new, more punitive and aggressive ones Obama just jammed through:
- Sam Kazman at the Competitive Enterprise Institute: “The National Academy of Sciences…issued a report last August finding that CAFE contributes to between 1,300 and 2,600 traffic deaths per year.”
- USA Today: “size and weight reductions of passenger vehicles undertaken to meet current CAFE standards had resulted in more than 46,000 deaths.”
- H. Sterling Burnett of the National Center for Policy Analysis: “322 additional deaths per year occur as a direct result of reducing just 100 pounds from already downsized small cars.”
- National Academy of Sciences’ auto fuel-economy study: “larger, heavier cars are more crashworthy than similarly equipped small cars, and CAFE restricts the production of those safer cars for the sake of fuel economy.”
Michelle Malkin says, “CAFE fuel standards clamp down on the production of larger, more crashworthy cars…CAFE kills.”
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Last year when Obama announced his intention to change standards, Issa warned, “Beyond jobs that would be lost as a result of this rule, there are concerns that these new regulations were crafted in a manner inconsistent with laws and basic standards of transparency that had the effect of hiding special interest agendas.”
He was rightly concerned that the Obama administration tends to do things behind closed doors. Remember Carol Browner, former Obama climate czar, told auto industry executives “to put nothing in writing, ever” when she was working backroom deals drafting these standards.
Of course Obama says “it’s good for middle class families”—ignoring the fact that these very people will have to pay thousands more for each vehicle and they may not want to buy the kind of car Obama tells them they should buy. (Chevy Volt, anyone?)
Remember, Obama knows what is good for you. If you have a family, you didn’t build that. He did, and he’ll tell you how to run it.
But you can’t say he didn’t warn us. He said, “You can’t drive your SUV’s, or eat what you want, or keep your thermostat at 72 degrees, and then expect other countries will just say O.K.”
So I guess we should lock up our pantries and hide our thermostats, because he’s probably coming for those things next.
The dictator in the White House has no business regulating consumers into poverty and oppression. He has consistently inserted himself into the free market and is regulating us to death…literally.
Sincerely,
Tony Adkins
Conservative Daily
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