Gov. Gretchen Whitmer this week requested $113 million to build demand for electric vehicles in Michigan. It’s just a down payment on the mass of build-outs and subsidies to come over the next decade, as Michigan tries to get two million electric vehicles on the road by 2030.

That would require a massive leap in demand. In 2021, only 17,500 electric vehicles were registered in the state, out of 8.7 million vehicles.

The road to two million will not be cheap. Whitmer has even spoken of the need for “electrified roads,” though neither of the two budgets she has proposed since making those remarks has funded the project.

And the road to two million EVs will not be organic. It won’t happen because these are the vehicles people want, can afford, and choose to buy. It will happen if — and only if — state and federal government officials continue to offer lavish subsidies to EV buyers. Given the cost of electric vehicles, and America’s median income of about $70,000, these subsidies will benefit the rich.

The feds are offering $7,500 rebates right now to buyers of certain EVs (though not $110,000 Hummers, President Biden). Whitmer’s 2024 budget seeks $48 million over two years for sales and use tax exemptions for EV buyers. How much more taxpayer money will be burned to promote the type of engines Lansing and Washington prefer?

Whitmer seeks another $65 million for charging stations and other EV infrastructure.

When Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow said last summer that she “went by every single gas station and it didn’t matter how high it was,” referring to gas prices above $5, that was a misrepresentation of the cost trade-off of EVs.

First, gas is not always that high; it rarely is.

• Related reading: Debbie Stabenow has lost touch with Michigan

Second, charging costs money, too. People who get a charging station installed in their homes will trade the gas station bills for higher energy bills. This comes as DTE Energy is moving to peak-hour pricing. Will people wait until after 7 p.m. to charge their EVs, or will they eat the higher cost that comes from peak-hour pricing? Decisions, decisions.

• Related reading: With peak-hour pricing, DTE prices in Michigan are on the cusp of California’s

Third, gas tanks take a minute or two, tops, to fill. EVs can take a half-hour to charge, at least until we get those electrified roads. That’s fine when you’re at home resting, but how about at the end of a long trip?

Freedom of movement is another concern. Michigan’s electric grid is shaky in the best of times. Meanwhile, it is moving away from coal and toward more wind and solar. Add two million EVs to the system and it’s hard to see how this goes well.

During a 2020 heat wave in California, EV users were asked to not plug in their vehicles during peak hours. Do you want the energy company deciding whether you can plug in and go?

EVs also come with moral and environmental trade-offs. Producing EVs requires mining an limited supply of materials, at a time when global demand is the highest. That mining itself brings atrocities and labor conditions that would never be approved by OSHA. We don’t see the people and the animals this affects, but it does affect them.

• Related reading: EVs and solar panels have moral and environmental trade-offs, too

People should get the type of car, or no car, that works for them. But the electric vehicle confers no high ground. It comes with trade-offs, like everything else.

Buy EVs if you like. Don’t ask me or my 10 million neighbors to pay for them.

James David Dickson is managing editor of Michigan Capitol Confidential. Email him at dickson@mackinac.org.

If your financial advisor continuously caused you to lose money, year after year, would you pay more money to that person in hopes of recovering your losses?

This is akin to the strategy Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is to help students who were left behind academically when their school districts closed in-person classes during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Paula Herbart, president of the Michigan Education Association, supports Whitmer’s “MI Kids Back on Track” plan, which would increase spending on school-provided tutoring and other activities.

In a post on the MEA’s website, Herbart blames everything except the public school system for student academic loss and mental health problems since the pandemic. The solution to academic recovery, she argues, is using the same system that failed students — and only that system.

Relying only on the system that caused academic and mental health setbacks is not looking out for the best interest of children.

Herbart says the pandemic caused between six to 12 months of learning loss. But it was not the pandemic that caused learning loss; it was school districts’ failure to return to in-person learning that caused learning loss. Teachers in the Detroit Public Schools Community District went as far as to threaten an illegal strike over returning to in-person schooling.

Whitmer did not recommend that Michigan schools return to in-person instruction until March 2021, an entire year after schools closed down on her order. When Whitmer made her recommendation, only 23% of Michigan schools had fully returned to in-person learning.

Between the 2018-19 academic year and the 2020-21 year, English proficiency declined by 32%, and math proficiency slipped by 36% in the public school system.

Though public school districts shuttered their doors during the pandemic, Catholic schools remained open, for the most part. They saw no change in reading or math scores compared to pre-pandemic outcomes.

Herbart writes: “The stakes are high and time is of the essence: The further our students fall behind, the less chance they’ll have at long-term academic achievement.”

Yet again, her solution is to fund the same educational institution that had a poor record even before the pandemic.

Detroit is repeatedly one of the worst-performing school districts in the nation. The National Assessment of Education Progress, known as the nation’s report card, revealed the district to be the country’s word urban district in 2009, 2011, 2013 and 2015. It has not fared much better since.

Herbart says failing school districts should receive more money to “expand existing school-based tutoring services” and hire more academic recovery specialists.

“In addition, districts could hire outside tutors to come into schools and work collaboratively school staff to help students,” Herbart writes.

She says that teachers know their students and what it will take to catch them up. If this is the case, why haven’t teachers brought students up to where they should be?

Parents know their children best. The GOP-controlled Legislature of the last term agreed and proposed a plan in 2021 to give parents vouchers for academic interventions, including tutoring. Whitmer and the MEA denounced the solution. Whitmer vetoed the bill.

Herbart called the idea a “convoluted voucher system” that would use “taxpayer dollars to benefit private, for-profit tutoring companies, and with little-to-no oversight.”

Parents had to adjust their work schedules, often with economic losses, to be home with children who were forced to online instruction. They have had to give time and money to remedy the mental health fallout of their children being alienated from friends and school activities.

Parents need something new. Students need something new. It’s time give parents the opportunity to fix what the public school system has not fixed.

Jamie A. Hope is assistant managing editor of Michigan Capitol Confidential. Email her at hope@mackinac.org.