zlacker

>>surpri+(OP)
They're going to eat our lunch because we let our legacy ICE vehicle manufacturers dictate the terms of the shift to electric. We have to be better about identifying economic developments that are likely to be concerns for domestic stability and national security, and not let greed and fear in the corporate class stop us from making the necessary changes. Another arena where we've already lost, in a sense, and will need to play hardball catch-up is healthcare: other countries have a more stable and hour-for-hour productive workforce because their workers can get preventative care and treatment for illnesses quickly and without a fuss. If we have to trash the medical insurance industry to reach parity with our peers, so be it.

>>underl+Bv1
I mean, the ultimate reason why the US doesn't have China's electric vehicle policy is that the US is a democracy, and it would be massively unpopular. The median US voter is, like, a 40-something mother in a random suburb of Pennsylvania, who doesn't have a college degree, has a house with a mortgage, and is moderate but doesn't pay much attention to politics. To get Chinese policies enacted in the US, people like that would have to be convinced that mass-producing electric cars was more important than preserving local forests (need 'em for a factory site), paying workers prevailing wage (drives up production costs), keeping gas and ICE car registration cheap (makes electric less competitive), having cheap goods on sale at Walmart (strong currency makes imports cheap but exports expensive), avoiding noise and dust from construction (have to put the power lines somewhere), running a low government deficit (manufacturing subsidies aren't free), etc. There's a lot of trade-offs that people don't want to make.

>>apsec1+dE1
> people like that would have to be convinced that mass-producing electric cars was more important than preserving local forests

As though there isn’t a glut of underutilized parking lots littering literally every American metro where the local forests were bulldozed decades ago

> paying workers prevailing wage

Subsidies are there to pay for wages and for automation to be less reliant on labor costs, of which China automates waaaay more than the USA does

> running a low government deficit

Industrial subsidies have the potential to pay back far more than the government puts in, and would be much smaller in size than other boondoggles the US government pays for

Honestly I think this is all just excuses and China just took advantage of the incompetence of our leadership to leapfrog us. Since when did Americans not want to be #1?

>>presen+ZK1
The average American voter likes parking lot and starts foaming at the mouth when talking about reducing minimums.

The other dirty secret is that government debt is actually very high in China and it’s a bit of a problem. Local and provincial governments in China have very little taxing power and so have been financing via opaque off-balance-sheet shell companies, and the exact number is not known but estimated at $8T. And now local government services are cutting back or even collapsing since the Chinese property market that was the collateral for a lot of this debt is in dire straits. https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Markets/China-debt-crunch/C...