Folks are having a lot of fun with Vice President Biden’s interview with Car and Driver, comparing VPOTUS’s real-life love for his Goodwood-green ’67 Corvette with the Trans-Am driving, Burt-Reynolds-meets-Jimmy-Buffett-meets-your-bachelor-uncle Biden persona that has featured in many an Onion parody.
Alas, the real Biden isn’t so funny. Dig him saying he’d have bailed out Detroit even in the absence of a global recession, that he’d do Cash for Clunkers all over again, and that “One role of government is to go where venture capital won’t.”
C/D: You said the loss of GM and Chrysler would’ve killed a million jobs?
JB: One million, absolutely. The critics talk about, “Oh, the market would have balanced things out.” But that’s like saying, “In the long run, we’ll all be dead.” Had we not forced the car companies to reorganize, then given them help, well, the failure of the suppliers then could have caused Ford to fail as well. So this has exceeded everyone’s expectations.
C/D: Absent a simultaneous recession, would you still have bailed them out?
JB: I would have, just because I don’t accept this proposition that somehow the U.S. cannot handle a heavy-duty manufacturing capacity, that we should shift our focus to service industries. Look at Japan and Germany—their labor costs are as high as ours. Big countries have to be able to make big things. Have to.
C/D: In ’09, you pushed a $2 billion grant for battery research. How’s that going?
JB: One of the things I’m proudest of is what we’ve done in battery technology. In the next decade, we’ll have batteries that are one-third to one-tenth the weight of today’s. You’ll be able to go 1000 miles. They’re making breakthroughs in the lithium-ion batteries packing more power. It’s already being applied to industrial uses—in buildings, generators, tractors. They’re on the cusp of a follow-on to the lithium-ion battery. You’ll see this leapfrog present technology. It’s going to be destabilizing, in one sense, because you’ll find that some of the [hybrid] technology out there becomes obsolete. But with the average life span of an automobile being less than a decade, it’s not going to matter much economically.
C/D: A repeat of Cash for Clunkers?
JB: Probably not. But it makes sense. One role of government is to go where venture capital won’t. In the Civil War, you had a president pay the railroads $16,000 for every mile of track they laid. You had Eisenhower invest $25 million in a defense agency called ARPA that came up with a thing that became the internet. We not only won’t get another Cash for Clunkers, but we’re having trouble keeping our friends on the other side of the aisle from doing away with what’s left of the seed money for innovative technologies that bring billions off the sidelines.
Maybe Biden ought to go to Mexico and cool his heels for a while.