What I find disingenuous about reports on the explicit point-of-sale tax credits for electric vehicles is that they never mention the enormous government support for traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles — particularly the tax breaks (forgone revenue) and unpriced externalities that benefit the oil and gas industry. Both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the U.S. Treasury state these "indirect" subsidies are significantly larger than renewable energy credits but are embedded deep within the tax code. This is how the delusion is spread that electric vehicles somehow unfairly benefit from government subsidies.
What I find disingenuous about reports on the explicit point-of-sale tax credits for electric vehicles is that they never mention the enormous government support for traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles — particularly the tax breaks (forgone revenue) and unpriced externalities that benefit the oil and gas industry. Both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the U.S. Treasury state these "indirect" subsidies are significantly larger than renewable energy credits but are embedded deep within the tax code. This is how the delusion is spread that electric vehicles somehow unfairly benefit from government subsidies.
Refs:
https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/131/General-Explanati...
https://thefactcoalition.org/report/oil-and-gas-tax-subsidie...
https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF1051...
https://taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-tax-incentive...
https://www.iisd.org/articles/iisd-news/fossil-fuel-subsidie...
https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-subsidies-fossil-fuels