In Indiana, Again

President Obama is on the road again, this time back to Indiana, to speak to the masses with a message of hope ---and a check for 2.4 billion dollars. The money is supposed to be used to develop a new generation of batteries that will be used in electric vehicles that could also be built in Indiana. This sounds good to the hungry ears of the poor unemployed souls that he is talking to, but I, who keeps his senses peeled for signs of innovation, think he is missing the point again. Evidently, he hasn't heard about Tesla motors in California, which already has a plug-in car with a range of 244 miles. Would they be willing to manufacture their vehicle in Indiana or Michigan rather than California? Might be a question worth asking. By the way, one version of the Tesla car will go from 0 - 60 mph in 3.7 seconds. This kind of acceleration could give you whiplash. I've written before that a company in China has been manufacturing a line of electric cars for over two years. The batteries that power their vehicles have an electrolyte that you could swallow. Maybe part of that 2.4 billion dollars could be used to buy manufacturing rights for technology that already exists, and jobs would be created at a much faster pace.


I only listened to the first little bit of his speech, because I pretty much heard it all before. His message of "Hope" always includes how tough the times are, and there won't be any immediate relief, and how the empathetic government is on their side and ready to help them out. A few months ago, Mike Huckabee did his television show from Elkhart, Indiana. He featured the local people, including the mayor and local businessmen, who told how they were coping. A number of the people had to rework their businesses to produce different products; for instance, one company that normally made upholstered seats for the RV industry used their fabric inventory and started to produce high-fashion handbags. The message from the Huckabee show was one of upbeat optimism, and no one thought it was the government's job to bail them out.

Here is my view. I think that if you would put up a "prize" of , say, fifty million dollars, for the person who came with a viable 100+mpg green car, you would get some takers. You would get the same results and you would have 2.35 billion dollars left to offer incentives to other would-be entrepreneurs. You know, the carrot approach. It has worked before.