It was March 23, 2010, when Barack Obama signed his infamous “Affordable Care Act” into law.
And in theory it was a nice idea. Healthcare in the US was incredibly expensive, and he wanted to bring costs down. But the execution was abysmal.
Since 2010, the number of uninsured Americans is still far, far beyond their most conservative projections. Medical costs in the Land of the Free have soared to record highs, vastly outpacing both inflation and wage growth.
According to the US Labor Department’s Consumer Expenditures data, for example, Americans spent 6.6% of their household budgets on healthcare back in 2010 before Obamacare was enacted.
That share has now risen beyond 8%. This means that Americans are spending more money on healthcare than before, and in many respects, they’re getting lower quality care: longer emergency room wait times. Longer referral wait times. More bureaucracy.
So, sure, making healthcare more affordable was a nice idea. But the execution was terrible.
And with Obamacare’s execution, one needn’t look any further than the debacle that became the healthcare.gov website.
They started development for the Obamacare website as soon as the legislation was signed. Its cost was originally supposed to be $93.7 million— which itself is an astonishing figure for a website. But, as usual with the government, spending quickly spiraled out of control.
According to an internal Inspector General report at the Department of Health and Human Services, healthcare.gov ended up costing a whopping $1.7 billion. And a separate analysis from Bloomberg had the total at $2.1 billion.
(It turned out, of course, that a senior executive at website development company was a college classmate of Michelle Obama’s at Princeton.)
Well, the Biden administration is not about to be outshined by the Obamas when it comes to gross financial mismanagement. And that leads us to our latest Inspired Idiot of the Week: Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
Buttigieg is already a distinguished passionate ignoramus.
When a train derailment last year was spewing toxic chemicals all over the town of East Palestine, Ohio, Buttigieg couldn’t be bothered to deal with it… because he was too busy making sure that automobile manufacturers were using female crash test dummies.
(He later on blamed Orange Man for the train derailment).
When it came time to spend $1 trillion from the federal infrastructure bill, Buttigieg went on a series of bizarre tirades claiming that “racism is physically built into some of our highways” and wailed that there were too many white construction workers.
And when a Singapore Airlines flight hit major turbulence last month, Buttigieg immediately shrieked “climate change” as the reason… even though major turbulence events were far more common 60+ years ago than they are today.
His latest crusade is the ill-fated cause of electric vehicles— which US consumers have been soundly rejecting. Today only 8% of consumers buy electric vehicles… and that number is falling.
Electric vehicle demand is so bad that auto manufacturers are starting to seriously scale back production and investment. It was only a few years ago that several major brands insisted they were going 100% electric… only to see their sales plummet.
They’re now walking back those designs and resurrecting the good ole’ internal combustion engine.
This is where the Biden administration has stepped in, recently mandating that, by 2030, 50% of passenger vehicles sold in the US must be electric or hybrid. Again, that’s more than 6x higher than today’s level.
It’s not enough that the government is ignoring consumer demand. They also want to make sure that you pay out the nose.
Like it or not, other countries (especially China) manufacture electric vehicles for far, far less than the US automaker can produce.
Yet rather than allow consumers to comply with the mandate by purchasing cheaper, foreign EVs, Team Biden is slapping huge tariffs on those cars. So, they’re going to force you to buy an EV, and they’re going to force you to spend a ton of money on it.
They’ve also completely ignored basic infrastructure issues.
US energy supply and demand fundamentals are so out of whack that there will likely be electricity shortages within the next 10 years… and that’s even without factoring in the massive new electricity demand from EVs.
A big part of this shortage is demand from power-hungry AI data centers. But there are major supply challenges as well.
Government policy at the state and federal level has forced many electric utility companies to shift to incredibly expensive and inefficient wind and solar production, while shutting down cheap nuclear power plants.
Naturally there are plenty of times when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow, so the end result is less reliable electricity.
Consider that over the last 15 years, thousands upon thousands of acres of solar panels and wind turbines have been installed across the US. Yet over the same period, total electrical generation in the US has barely moved. In fact, electricity generation today is almost at the same level it was back in 2007.
Electricity supply is simply not growing to keep up with demand. And again, that’s before taking into consideration the huge bump in electricity demand that will take place when the EV mandate goes into effect in 2030.
There’s also a ton of other infrastructure to take into consideration… like the electrical charging stations that will need to pop up all over the country. Every lonely highway, every small town, every backwoods speed trap, is going to need to bring in new, expensive electric charging equipment.
And this is where Pete Buttigieg is once again on the case; he has trained his gaze now on building charging stations across America… and allocated $7.5 billion to do so.
How many charging stations do the American taxpayers have to show for this $7.5 billion investment?
7. As in… 1 2 3 4 5 6 7. Seven.
Buttigieg admitted this himself on TV recently, downplaying his failures by suggesting that it will ultimately be the responsibility of consumers to charge their vehicles at home. So, it’s ultimately your problem.
Buttigieg is one of the purest representations of an Inspired Idiot. They don’t even bother trying to understand the problem, let alone the solution. When confronted with a problem, they beat out one of the accepted lines— racism or climate change or Orange Man.
They push idiotic, impossible mandates and then issue contradictory tariffs without even realizing what they’re doing. And just like Obamacare, their mandates make people worse off.
And even when they only have ONE JOB to help the process along— build some charging stations— they can’t even manage to get that right.
With a $7.5 billion budget and just seven charging stations to show the taxpayers, Pete Buttigieg is putting the Obamacare website to shame. And he’s only getting started.
