President Trump this week said he intends to roll back former President Biden’s “CAFE standards,” which would have mandated car-fleet mileage standards in a de facto effort to regulate out gas-powered cars. “The idea was that by 2032, 67 percent of our fleet would be electric cars, which is insane on many levels,” says Rich on today’s edition of The Editors.
Charlie agrees, and reminds listeners that “Joe Biden tried without Congress to create the conditions within which cars that were not electric were phased out.” The New York Times called Biden’s move “just some guidelines,” but Charlie says, “It was never just some guidelines. It was an attempt to completely restructure the industry.”
“We have seen a host of mandates added to new cars,” he says. “There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with automatic braking or mandatory rear cameras, or even good fuel economy. The problem is the mandate. This is something progressives often fail to understand. They think that if something is good, then it must be mandated. Something is bad, it must be banned. There’s a lot of gray area between those things. Not every good idea, not every safe idea ought to be mandated, because it drives up the cost of cars.”
Charlie believes Trump’s announcement is a good step for a number of reasons, but especially “because it is an affordability play. This will help to lower the cost of new cars.”
“That is a boon to the consumer for which the Trump administration ought to be praised.”
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