Electric cars are actually bad for the American economy though…
Each one takes less labor to build and the overwhelming majority of factories capable of producing ev batteries are overseas.
So while we can make evs domestically with less labor we now have fewer jobs and one of the most expensive parts of the car is being imported anyway, exerting downward pressure on the domestic workers in assembly.
So every electric car that replaces an internal combustion car is reducing the gdp in measurable terms.
Not that gdp is a good measure, but there’s a hard undeniable kernel of truth to the statement that electric cars are bad for the economy and specifically in a way that hurts working class Americans most.
What will that money be doing?
how are the ostensible productivity gains from evs going to be used to help american workers?
it's hard to believe that the reduced demand for skilled tooling, die and machining labor will translate into some kind of gain for the communities and people that rely on that work to survive.
and we've seen how anemic reskilling efforts are and how the usual boilerplate response, "learn to code", is completely defunct with the combination of LLMs and the cheap overseas junior dev labor pool.
american conservatives are trotting out these arguments to appeal to people who feel like they're being forced to give up their lifestyle (driving cars with cheap gas), and materially are actually being heavily pressured to get evs without fully understanding the economics of this new class of Second Most Expensive Thing Most Americans Will Ever Buy, but that doesn't mean that the realities that appeal is built on aren't there.