I thank the taxpayers for my new car | Jon Caldara | Opinion

I want to thank the taxpayers of Colorado for my brand new car. Really, thank you to each and every one of you scammers.

You know, I’ve never had a brand new, used car in my 60 years. Instead, I buy used, and I mean really used, cars and drive them until I drop. After college, I bought a sexy Datsun 210 for $500 and sold it eight years later for $950.

My current beater is a 2010 Nissan Altima. I bought it with 95,000 miles for $6,000. It has now covered over 200,000 miles and is still going strong. I drive ugly, old used cars.

Why do I drive these cars? Simply because I know what women like. Although they rarely admit it out loud, a woman can’t help but think, “Mommy wants me to have some of this,” when she sees a bald man driving around town in a 15-year-old, rusted Japanese car.

So why buy a new car? It’s more than just my boredom when hot women leave their phone numbers under my windshield wiper blade. I think at my age I should stop spending a lot of money on hot rods that attract women and start living more frugally. And there’s nothing more economical than getting other people to buy you crap.

And this is where you came into play. Thanks to obscene tax credits, mandates and regulations from the people who voted you into office, I haven’t paid for most of this car.

Well, “car” might be a strong word. It’s more like a golf cart with Bluetooth. It’s a Nissan Leaf.

“Sheet.” They fucking called it “leaf.” I remember having my man card ripped into confetti-sized pieces and blown in my face to buy a minivan when my kids were little. But that made me feel like a lumberjack, as opposed to signing the papers on a “sheet.”

My daughter likes to call our cars “Mary, the Mazda,” “Nancy, the Nissan,” etc. When she saw me driving in the testosterone-releasing Leaf, her reaction was simple: “Dad, let’s just call it Summer’s Evening.”

OK. I agree it may not have the raw machismo of a beat-up old Camry, but why look a gift horse in the mouth? The list price for my new, all-electric 2025 Leaf is almost $32,000. Yet I only paid $15,000 for it.

Thanks to its environmental friendliness, I got this new car at a 53% discount. There aren’t many good used cars for this price.

That $17,000 in welfare went to me, another upper-middle class white guy who put a second car in his two-car garage. I now have a spare car for short trips. Most electric cars are second or third cars for white people who could afford another car without welfare. And it’s the left that whines about systematic racism?

The government threw $7,500 at my new toy and the state of Colorado donated another $2,500. Yes, this would be the same Colorado that doesn’t have the money to fix our roads, the same state whose governor has announced plans to cut road funding by $100 million.

Well, that explains $10,000 of the $17,000 I was given. Where does the rest come from? Regulations of course.

The annual production of car manufacturers can only have a limited amount of exhaust emissions on average across their fleet. That means if they ignore it, which is always the case, they only have two options. Either they have to build all electric vehicles and sell them well below the purchase cost, i.e. my car, or they buy the unused emissions credits from their competitors.

So the last $7,000 in welfare you gave me goes toward higher prices you have to pay for cars that people actually want. You know, cars that can be quickly refueled at the pump instead of having to wait hours to charge.

Tesla’s biggest profit center isn’t actually sales. It sells its pollution credits to its competitors because none of their fleets have tailpipes. The company is entirely based on tax credits and emissions regulations. Without them, no electric car could survive on the market.

Period.

Of course, my new male Leaf is better for the environment since he doesn’t produce any emissions, except, um, he doesn’t. The majority of Colorado’s electricity is generated from coal and natural gas.

Or as the coal industry should advertise: “Coal is what Teslas eat for dinner.”

Anyway, thanks for my unnecessary coal-powered toy.

Jon Caldara is president of the Independence Institute in Denver and hosts “The Devil’s Advocate with Jon Caldara” on Colorado Public Television Channel 12. His column appears Sundays in Colorado Politics.