Opinion | It’s time to admit it: Michigan’s EV pipe dream has failed

It was recently reported by Bridge Michigan that the $1 billion spent by the State of Michigan on electric vehicle and battery plant projects had only created a mere 200 jobs, meaning we paid $5 million of your taxes for each job.  To put that number in a little bit of perspective, all but eight of the players on the Detroit Lions roster made less than $5 million last season.

Meanwhile, Michigan ranks 41^st in starting teacher pay. Instead of spending $1 billion on EV plants, we could have given every teacher a raise of nearly $3,000. Alternatively, we could have paved a brand new highway from the state Capitol to the Mackinac Bridge, and paid for it in cash, with money left over.

We can probably all agree that spending $5 million per job is a massive failure. Yet, many in Lansing are doubling down on this reckless plan, even going as far as getting in bed with the Chinese Communists to lure them to rural Michigan against the advice of national security experts. 

I was against spending your tax dollars for these projects from the beginning and paid a political price for it. I was lambasted as somehow opposing jobs here in Michigan, but I predicted at the time that working families in Michigan would pay the price while corporate elites would reap the benefits.  

Mark my words, electric vehicle plants will systematically replace and reduce the number of good paying auto manufacturing jobs here in Michigan and across America.

Now, President Biden’s EPA is trying to regulate conventional gas vehicles out of production in the next eight years. They know they cannot get this mandate through a vote of Congress, so they are pushing this Green New Deal policy through unelected bureaucrats that make pseudo-laws that affect all of us.

So now we have spent well over a billion of state tax dollars to build these plants while the federal government incentivizes the purchase of electric vehicles and forces them on drivers who don’t want them. The corporate bosses get rich while working families see their taxes pay millionaires to buy electric cars from billionaires.

Let me be clear, electric vehicles should never be forced upon us. My wife, Ashley, and I are raising our four kids right here in Michigan in Joe Biden’s economy. I am not too proud to admit that I cannot afford an electric vehicle for my family, and I will never mandate that you buy one for yours. I respect the innovation that electric vehicles have brought, but it should remain up to each person to decide the vehicle that best fits their needs without getting the permission of some bureaucrat they have never met in Washington, D.C.