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

Are there worthier causes the government could spend that on? Or maybe not spend the money at all, to reduce the deficit and ease pressure on interest rates and inflation? It's a politically charged question.

My personal thought is that government subsidy gets the best return on investment when the market is small (so the investment / denominator is small) and difficult to operate without the subsidy (so the improvement / numerator is increased a lot by the subsidy).

Heading into 2026 the EV market is pretty established and is no longer in that regime. The subsidies scale linearly with market size. Whether it makes sense to continue investment depends on how the positive externalities scale and the ratio of marginal positive externality to marginal government subsidy.

Maybe it's worth it, maybe it's not. But you can't assume the juice is still worth the squeeze in ~2026 just because the investment was justifiable when these policies were originally established back around ~2010 or so -- especially considering a fixed credit (per vehicle) means you need a lot more squeeze in ~2026 (when there are a lot more people buying vehicles than in ~2010).