What’s the greatest fear of the owner of a purely electric car? Running out of juice, of course! Not even a tiny gasoline engine to chug on home or to the nearest gas station. This not only eliminates long trips but can induce a nervousness even around town dubbed “range anxiety.” But fear not; there’s an answer! Installing recharging facilities - and lots of ‘em because juicing up a car battery is a sloooooooow process. (Car owners, bring a book.…

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Former CEI Warren Brookes Fellow Tim Carney, highlights the high cost of the Cash for Clunkers program, which I wrote about here yesterday.

Two experts — car-selling Web site Edmunds.com and economic modeler Macroeconomic Advisers — estimated that a vast majority of the trade-ins that take advantage of Cash for Clunkers would have happened anyway.

But were Cash for Clunkers mere waste. The program has created some winners.

One lobbyist for this bill was Nucor Steel. In Cayuga County, N.Y., Nucor turns scrap steel into…

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Rapidly-rising Medicare spending already threatens “to crush the federal budget,” and much Medicare spending is wasteful, yet the Obama Administration claims it can somehow save money by creating Medicare-like programs to cover all Americans. In the New York Times, economics professor Tyler Cowan calls it “the new voodoo economics.” Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson concludes that Obama’s health-care plan “is naive, hypocritical or simply dishonest. Probably all three.”

Obama is firing an inspector general who exposed wrongdoing by one of his supporters, and previously…

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One of Obama’s own advisers admits that the cap-and-trade energy-rationing scheme backed by the “Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats” would “have a trivially small effect on global warming while imposing substantial costs on all American households. And to get political support in key states, the legislation would abandon the auctioning of permits in favor of giving permits to selected corporations.”

Obama adviser Martin Feldstein notes that “the Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that the resulting increases in consumer prices” from capping the amount of…

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Also at Heritage today, FreedomWorks chief economist Wayne Brough described his organization’s legal analysis of the constitutionality of the Troubled Assets Relief Program. “There is a very strong non-delegation argument against the TARP,” he said. “They basically took all the debate out of the Congress and put it all in the Treasury in the Executive branch…They gave the Treasury a $700-billion blank check to spend at whim.”

For more on bailouts, see BeyondBailouts.org, a project of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the…

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In his Examiner column today, former CEI Brookes Fellow Tim Carney explodes the myth of AIG as a stalwart defender of free markets that caved in at the sight of federal dollars coming its way:

AIG in 2007 joined the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (US-CAP), a group whose purpose is to lobby for federal restrictions on greenhouse gases. Specifically, US-CAP lobbies for a scheme of mandatory federal caps on greenhouse gas emissions with tradable emission allowances—a “cap-and-trade” policy pushed hard by Enron…

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