Biden Bans 53% of Americans From Buying Cars

By Daniel Greenfield April 11, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog

The New York Times reported that the Biden administration will abuse EPA regulations to eliminate most real car sales by 2030. The plan is to force 67% of car sales to be electric by 2032. Most Americans won’t be able to afford them, but they’ll have no other options.

Even the cheapest electric cars, which are still far more expensive than their real car counterparts and are just one battery problem away from turning into mostly unusable junk, are out of the price range of the majority of Americans who need an income of $80,000 to make an EV auto loan work. That’s fine in Washington D.C. where the median income of $83,567 is the highest in the nation, but will entirely price much of the country out of the new car market.

53% of Americans earn less than $75,000. Some of the 16% who earn from $50,000 to $75,000 may be able to make an electric vehicle purchase work if they squeeze, cut back on food and clothes for the kids, but the remaining 37% will be completely locked out. And, unable to own a car, they’ll have even bigger monthly payments or, with no transportation, be unable to work.

The new poor will be anyone who can’t afford an electric car. And that’s 53% of Americans.

This isn’t class warfare: it’s class genocide. The Biden administration is moving to reserve car ownership privileges for the Tesla class while eliminating working class ownership and the social mobility and the economic possibilities that come with it under the guise of environmentalism.

Steadily raising emissions standards has pushed the price of a new car toward $50,000. Obama’s emissions standards raised the cost by thousands of dollars, and California, as one of the largest markets in the country, further distorted costs for car buyers nationwide. Prices rose steadily and, when combined with runaway inflationary government spending, shot up wildly.

The average cost of a non-luxury car last year nearly hit $45,000. Since people only have so much money to spend, sales also dropped by 9% and millions fewer cars were sold. Even as America’s population has continued growing, its car sales have been falling.

Who is going to be shut out of Biden’s new banned car market?

The median income of 47 of the 52 states fall below the amount needed to buy an electric car.

The Biden administration is fixated on racial equity, but its ban on cars cuts off the vast majority of black people, Latinos and for that matter white people from car ownership. With a median income of $46,400, black people would either have to dedicate a fifth of their pre-tax incomes to car payments or spend most of their annual salary on a car. With a $55,321 median income, Latinos won’t have an easy time of it and even with a $74,932 median income, white people will be left behind. The new equity will mean that hardly anyone will be able to afford to buy a car.

American automakers, having long ago lost the battle to Asia, instead decided to use government regulations to end competition around price and quality. GM and Ford have squandered billions on green vehicles. Ford alone reported a $3 billion loss on electric cars. And yet the automakers are retooling for a marketplace that has no connection with consumers.

Ford expects to sell 2 million electric cars in 2025. That’s up from 61,575 last year. How do you go from selling tens of thousands of cars to millions? Either the cars are going to get a whole lot better and cheaper, or the automaker expects customers to have no choice in the matter.

The carmaker didn’t even sell 2 million cars in 2023. How does it expect to sell 2 million of a type of vehicle that few want or can afford? The answer is government regulations.

Eliminate people’s ability to buy anything other than an electric car and there’s your business model. And yet the bulk of electric car sales are happening in the luxury segment while the cheapest electric cars are subsidized and still often sell at a loss. But that’s true of a lot of electric vehicles which can lose money no matter how overpriced or subsidized they are.

The Ford/Soros investment in Rivian fared poorly with the trendy electric pickup truck manufacturer spending $220,000 to make vehicles it sold for $81,000.

Numbers like these don’t work, no matter how you subsidize them. They only start working when the business model not only sheds affordable cars, but also private car ownership.

Dan Ammann, the former president of GM, claimed that “the human-driven, gasoline-powered, single-passenger car” is the “fundamental problem” in a post titled, “We Need to Move Beyond the Car”.

Western automakers are moving beyond the car as a product to the car as a service. Self-driving technology combined with apps means car access rather than car ownership. Everyone will ‘Uber’ or ‘Lyft’ while spending far more money on transportation and getting a lot less out of it. And most of all the freedom of being able to go anywhere will be gone. You will not just get into a car and go anywhere you want. Like free speech, that will no longer be an option.

But as the World Economic Forum pledged, “We will own nothing and be happy.” Trust them to keep at least half of that promise.

Much like private home ownership is being steadily eliminated, private car ownership is also on the chopping block. By the 2030s, the plan is that the vast majority of America will not own cars, they will pay money to access them until they aren’t even allowed to do that. The electric cars will consume a growing portion of monthly earnings and will have very limited range. A younger generation may view a time when Americans owned their own cars the way we look back at the days when people could buy guns in hardware stores, smoke cigarettes, and hurl lawn darts.

What begins with 53% of Americans will eventually encompass the vast majority of the country.

By then car ownership will be mostly pointless anyway. Some will try to keep used cars going, but insurance regulations and clean air standards will force them off the road. The Biden ‘infrastructure’ bill already has the government monitoring where you drive and included a measure to allow it to turn off your car. California’s failed experiment in solar and wind has led to brownouts and bans on charging cars. Much as drought emergencies lead to bans on watering your lawn, the perpetual power emergencies will outlaw pleasure drives. Even if you own a car, it will only be yours in name only. And that will make surrendering it all too easy.

The blow of depriving 53% of Americans of car ownership will be initially softened with subsidies and environmentalist virtue signaling. Older generations, best able to afford cars, will be the least affected, while younger generations, least able to afford cars, are already dropping out of the market. By the time their children come of age, they will not even know what they missed.

Americans have let the government strip so much of their freedom and future. Will the majority of the country allow the Biden administration to take away their cars?

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.