Like a virus bad policy spreads from state to state

It's wonderful that we can help the rich pad their environmental street cred.  Perhaps we can help advance 'medical technology' by subsidizing their cosmetic surgery.  Heck they've already bought their 20 million dollar houses on us.  Hat tip Planet Gore


Add Tennessee — red-state, middle-America, country-music-lovin’ Tennessee?! — to the list of states offering tax breaks for the rich to buy battery-powered cars. The feds are already forking over $7,500 per car of your money so that Leo DiCaprio can drive a Chevy Volt. And states like Left Coast California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington have tacked on another $5,000 to further pad the green gentry’s wallets. The typical buyer of expensive green vehicles makes well over six-figures.

Tennessee’s move seems to be a nod to its Big Auto resident, Nissan, which received a pile of your money — $1.4 billion from a Department of Energy loan program — to retool a factory to build its new Nissan Leaf, an all-electric competitor to the Volt. The state will offer a $2,500 tax rebate to buyers of the first 1,000 electric vehicles sold.

Thanks to government’s trickle-up economics, the Leaf’s sticker when it is rolled out this winter will drop to $22,780 from its list of $32,780. The Volt would drop to $31,000 from $41,000