The hosts of Fox's Outnumbered were outraged that the IRS has expanded tax credits for electric vehicle charging stations so that just about everyone in the country now qualifies.
February 1, 2024

The hosts of Fox's Outnumbered were outraged that the IRS has expanded tax credits for electric vehicle charging stations so that just about everyone in the country now qualifies. The propagandists on Fox already hate EV's, and they hate Joe Biden and Barack Obama, so an article from The Daily Caller attacking the Biden administration for classifying Martha's Vineyard and other "elite locales" as "low-income" was all the excuse they needed to go after all three.

What the article, and the hosts on Fox who railed on about Martha's Vineyard and other wealthy towns supposedly being classified as low-income failed to mention is that most of the tracts in Dukes County that qualified for the subsidies did not qualify because they were "low-income." They qualified because they're rural.

Here's some of the press release from the Department of the Treasury with their new guidance on vehicle charging infrastructure:

Today the U.S. Department of the Treasury and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) released additional guidance under President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to lower Americans’ energy bills by providing clarity on eligibility for incentives to install electric vehicle charging stations and other alternative fuel refueling stations. The Department of Energy is also releasing a mapping tool today to help households, businesses, or other organizations considering those investments to find out whether they may be eligible for the tax credit. [...]

The Alternative Fuel Vehicle Refueling Property Credit (30C) works in concert with the Inflation Reduction Act’s Clean Vehicle Credit and Advanced Manufacturing Production Credit to encourage clean vehicle adoption, lower costs for consumers, and onshore the entire clean vehicle supply chain. This incentive provides a credit for up to 30% of the cost of qualified alternative fuel vehicle refueling property placed in service by the taxpayer. [...]

Today’s notice announces an intent to propose regulations to define eligible census tract and includes two appendices that provide the list of eligible census tracts. Low-income community census tracts follow the definition provided for purposes of the new markets tax credit. Non-urban census tracts would be those tracts within which at least 10% of the census blocks are outside of urban areas.

They have an attached appendix that lists all of the counties in the United States and which ones qualify.

Here's a screen shot of Dukes County where Martha's Vineyard is located.

dukes_county_tracts

So 22 percent of the tracts in Duke County qualify as low income. The rest qualify because they're rural. Guess what that lines up with? People living below the poverty level in Dukes County:

dukes_county_income

Not everyone that lives there is rich. The yakkers on Fox basically admitted as much, but then shifted the conversation from attacking the Biden administration for supposedly wanting to give tax cuts to rich people, to claiming the working people who live there can never afford to buy an electric vehicle, even though the price for electric vehicles continues to go down.

One of the problems the market is facing is the lack of infrastructure and charging stations, which the Biden administration is attempting to help fix with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, but you're never going to see anything but attacks on that legislation and hit pieces like this one from the right.

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