California’s ambitious statewide electric bicycle incentive program is officially dead – and it didn’t even get a funeral. After years...

cross-posted from: https://fedia.io/m/[email protected]/t/2946252

California’s ambitious statewide electric bicycle incentive program is officially dead – and it didn’t even get a funeral. After years…

  • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.worldEnglish
    24·
    3 days ago

    You can’t build a non absolute junk e bike for 1k with the tarrifs. You likely couldn’t really do it even with just inflation. There was a specific window that this was maybe possible and nobody built the industry partners with contracts to actually exploit it, just figured offering the money would get it to happen. Welp.

    Demand side policy alone is always just either a failure or creates perverse incentives. See similar outcomes for tax breaks to encourage say solar panel installation to create green new jobs. Great, you’re paying for installers and still have no domestic production industry

    • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      14·
      3 days ago

      Demand side policy alone is always just either a failure or creates perverse incentives.

      You should check out the entire car-dependent dystopia sometime. Cars are totally subsidized and literally destroying the planet while people complain about coupons for bikes.

      • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        3 days ago

        You won’t find me arguing against that. That’s a case of supply side incentives against the wrong thing. That was kind of my point. We’re doing dumb liberal things like rebates for what’s good and actual industrial policy for what destroys us.

    • Soup@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      3 days ago

      You also can’t reliably buy a car that isn’t on its way for less than $15-20k(Canadian) used and new cars are expensive these days. They’re normalized but that doesn’t mean that North Americans aren’t essentially forced to spend tens pf thousands of dollars on cars on a somewhat regular basis.

      • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        4·
        3 days ago

        They’re just complaining incoherently and counter-productively about coupons for bikes. The obfuscatory terminology (eg. demand side policy, perverse incentives) indicates a lib brainwashed by economic pseudo-science. There’s nothing “perverse” about riding bikes and saving the planet. It’s just nonsense econ jargon developed precisely to serve capital/cars. Note the extreme lack of any better idea.

        Bonus boomer points for hating on solar panels.

        • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          3 days ago

          Lib. Right. Me arguing that direct industry incentives ala China and India to actually solve your problems from a supply side instead of demand side incentives that just enrich middlemen while solving Jack Shit is totally a neolib position, not a materialist heterodox one.