I have spent time on Twitter and Facebook making fun of our vice president, Joe Biden, the possessor of a two-digit IQ but a mile-wide mouth.

I’ve written that Biden makes Dan Quayle look like a Phi Beta Kappa in comparison. Biden is Barack Obama’s impeachment insurance. Biden is to national politics what former U.S. Rep. Steve Kagen (D–Appleton) was to Wisconsin politics — someone whose ego was in inverse proportion to his intelligence.

But to prove that a stopped (digital) clock is right once a day, Biden has one commendable attribute: He owns a Corvette, as he bragged in an interview with Car and Driver:

C/D: Which cars do you most recall?

JB: I bought a ’51 Studebaker. My dad thought it was nice and calm, but it had that overdrive, and it was fast. Then I bought a 1952 Plymouth convertible, candy-apple red with a split windshield. I think that was my favorite. I had a ’56 Chevy, then in college I bought a 100,000-mile Mercedes 190SL with those Solex carburetors that never functioned. And I still have my 1967 Goodwood-green Corvette, 327, 350-horse, with a rear-axle ratio that really gets up and goes. The Secret Service won’t let me drive it. I’m not allowed to drive anything. It’s the one thing I hate about this job. I’m serious.

Well, we can all hope that Biden gets the chance to drive the Corvette after Jan. 20, 2013. I’m serious.

Not surprisingly, Biden touts the government bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler:

C/D: It must be gratifying to see Chrysler pay off its government loans six years early. Where is GM in its payback schedule?

JB: GM is on schedule. They’ve paid back a significant portion. We still hold 33.3 percent of GM common equity, but the point is that 33.3 percent is worth something. So taxpayers have an asset. But the best news is GM is talking about hiring back essentially the last of the laid-off workers by year’s end. No one ever thought we’d get there.

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.

That’s Biden’s (which means Obama’s) view. Now here’s reality, as observed by Megan McArdle of The Atlantic:

What lesson, exactly, are we supposed to learn from this “success”?  What question did it answer? “Can the government keep companies operating if it is willing to give them a virtually interest free loan of $50 billion, and a tax-free gift of $20 billion or so?”  I don’t think that this was really in dispute. When all is said and done, we will probably have given them a sum equal to its 2007 market cap and roughly four times GM’s 2008 market capitalization.

No, the question was not whether GM could make a profit after a bankruptcy that stiffed most of its creditors and shed the most grotesque burdens of its legacy costs, nor whether giving companies money will make them more profitable.  The question is whether it was worth it to the taxpayer to burn $10-20 billion in order to give the company another shot at life. To put that in perspective, GM had about 75,000 hourly workers before the bankruptcy. We could have given each of them a cool $250,000 and still come out well ahead compared to the ultimate cost of the bailout including the tax breaks–and over $100,000 a piece if we just wanted to break even against our losses on the common stock.

And if we’d done that, we’d have saved ourselves in other ways.  We would have reduced some of the overcapacity that plagues the global industry.  We would not have seen the government throwing its weight into a bankruptcy proceeding in order to redistribute money from creditors to pensioners, which isn’t a good precedent.

But even if you still think that the bailout was a good idea, there’s something you should consider before we start celebrating the administration’s Solomonic wisdom: the Obama administration’s rush to dispose of its GM stake before the 2012 election is probably costing us billions. No one I interviewed for my piece on GM was exactly enthusiastic about an early IPO; doing it so quickly meant that the company had very little to show in the way of earnings and stability.

Car and Driver didn’t bother to ask Biden why the Obama administration is working hard to make sure that no one will be able to buy the 2000s equivalent of Biden’s Corvette. Fuel economy regulations the administration is jamming down our throats and pollution regulations Obama is trying to jam down our throats mean that cars will get smaller and less capable but more expensive. (Particularly pickup trucks and sport-utility vehicles, which GM was able to build and sell at a profit before 2008 happened. GM also makes money on Corvettes.) But that’s OK because given what the Obama administration is doing to the economy and specifically to the dollar (not to mention Obama’s plans for carbon taxes), neither you nor I will be able to afford a new vehicle from GM or any other carmaker anyway. (Which appears to be what the administration wants given the money it is wasting on “high-speed” rail.)

This is the kind of “industrial policy” that a majority of voters decided they wanted in November 2008. That includes the infamous Cash for Clunkers, explained in this comment:

You had people with 15 year old Ford Explorers that were paid off that still ran perfectly fine.  Sure their mpgs went from 18mpg to 28.  However, their monthly payments went from $0 to $400.  In the course of a 5 year loan that’s $24,000.  That much money buys you 6,000 gallons of gas (at $4/gal) which allows you to drive a bit over 100K miles. You’d have to drive for a decade just to break even.  I’m also willing to bet that an Explorer can run another 10 years before going to the scrap yard over your brand new Chevy Cruze.

The question car enthusiasts ask is what car-buyers will get in exchange for the tens of billions of our tax dollars. And based on this Motor Trend interview with GM’s Mark Reuss, you should not be optimistic:

With CAFE regulations only expected to tighten, Reuss sees the truck market evolving into more specialized vehicles. Referencing his time abroad living in countries with much higher fuel prices, Reuss noted that people tended to use the best vehicle for their needs rather than a catch-all pickup truck like you find in America today. He gave the example of a flower shop making deliveries with a full-size [Ford] E-Series van when a Transit Connect would work fine. Where today he sees American craftsman buying a pickup truck that can do anything from hauling the family to hauling a horse trailer, in the future he sees them buying fewer all-purpose trucks and more vehicles that fit their specific needs.

You may have seen Chevrolet’s incredibly annoying Volt commercials. If you have, you know that the Volt is a gas/electric car that can be plugged in. Chevy’s goal was to sell 10,000 Volts in 2011, at about $32,500, including a $7,500 federal tax rebate. According to Jalopnik.com, through the end of September, Chevy had shipped to dealers (sales plus those sitting on car lots) 3,895 Volts, with more than 2,600 of them for sale. Do the math, and in nine months Chevy has sold around 1,200 Volts, about 130 of them per month, including 723 in September. In contrast, Chevy sold 5,246 Suburbans in September.

The financial experts say that families should spend no more than one-third to one-half their annual income on a vehicle. (As of 2009, the average car cost 22.1 weeks of family income.) When you consider all the things that families do — commuting to work, transporting kids to their various activities, or pulling a trailer, camper or boat — the idea that a family will buy one vehicle per family need is absurd, not to mention unaffordable. Between costs and the fact that vehicles last longer, families will be looking for more, not less, out of their vehicles. If GM can’t figure that out, then all that taxpayer money was wasted, because GM will not be long for this world. (Nor, one thinks, will be activities that require further carbon emissions, such as boating or snowmobiling.)

Alfred Sloan, the long-time chairman of GM, was fond of a term called “planned obsolescence,” which would prompt new car sales when cars wore out or their owners got tired of them. That seems to be what the carmakers seem to be refoisting on consumers with such technologies as cylinder deactivation and start–stop, where cars’ engines shut off at stop lights to allegedly save fuel and emissions.

The latter came to mind Monday when I dropped off our oldest son at his soccer match, went back home to pick up our daughter from Girl Scouts, and returned to the other side of Ripon to pick up our other son (his school is across the street from the park where the soccer field is located), and watch said soccer match. Between our house and the school and soccer field, route alternative one includes three stoplights, one four-way stop sign and two additional stop signs; alternative two replaces the two stoplights with one more four-way stop and two more stop signs. One trip means a dozen opportunities for your start–stop-equipped car to shut off its engine. It is impossible for me to imagine that such a system will not decrease the life of the vehicle on which it is equipped. That may represent an opportunity to sell another car for GM; for me,  it’s a reason to not buy a car so equipped.

GM’s recent government-fueled (see McArdle’s explanation) profits notwithstanding, the thing automakers appear to have not grasped yet is that their future includes fewer, not more, vehicle sales. Businesses make profits in an era of reduced sales by increasing profits on each sale. If cars last longer, over time automakers will sell fewer of them, and at some point carmakers will run out of new markets. (China, for instance, which appears to be taking a 180-degree turn away from freedom.) A company increases profits by some combination of increasing revenues and reducing expenses. (See United Auto Workers.)

This is the time of year where automakers used to roll out their new cars and car enthusiasts would be excited about said new cars. Automakers now roll them out all year, but even independent of that, there’s nothing particularly exciting or, more importantly, useful coming from the automakers these days that could be considered affordable. I will believe in the value of hybrids or all-electric vehicles as soon as our family of five and all their stuff can fit in one and be transported to our three-digit-mileage destination without making their parents bankrupt paying for said vehicle. That’s not happening anytime soon.