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**Written by Doug Powers

Cranking up the Chevy Volt subsidy from $7,500 to $10,000 isn’t “fresh” news. The proposal is in the White House 2013 budget that Harry Reid is sitting on, but President Obama continues to promote the idea as essential to decreasing America’s dependence on the free market… er, I mean oil:

President Barack Obama is touting a new series of green-tech subsidies in North Carolina Wednesday, simultaneously trying to goose his prospects in the swing-state and to jump-start his stalled plan to minimize the nation’s use of gasoline.

The new subsidies include an expansion of the $7,500 subsidy for the wealthy buyers of the Chevy Volt.

If Congress approves Obama’s proposal, the government will be giving $10,000 in taxpayer money to people wealthy enough to buy novel green-tech autos that are powered by batteries or natural-gas.

The new $10,000 credit, according to a White House statement, should “be applied to additional types of technologies, not currently covered.”

If this doesn’t work, can “buy one, get one free” be far behind?

The $10,000 subsidy proposal wouldn’t be confined only to Volts, because that wouldn’t be nearly expensive enough to save money in the long run. It’s all part of a billion dollar proposal to promote “alternative” vehicles:

President Barack Obama used his visit to a North Carolina truck manufacturer on Wednesday to announce a $1 billion program to promote electric and other alternative vehicles through tax incentives for consumers and federal grants to states to finance infrastructure to support them.
[...]
The plan also includes a “Race to the Top” contest that would award grants to states with “model communities” that invest in the infrastructure to support those vehicles, such as charging stations or natural gas corridors “where alternative fuel trucks can transport goods without using a drop of oil,” the White House Press Fact Sheet on the program states.

So far the only thing that appears to be engaged in an aggressive “race to the top” as a result of all this is the national debt.

**Written by Doug Powers

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