1) CFLs are more expensive to manufacture than incandescents
2) CFLs are therefore considerable more expensive to buy than incandescents.
3) There is therefore a strong downward pressure on price for incandescents
4) Chinese knock out cheap, low quality incandescents
5) Cheap, low quality incandescents fail early, meaning that their claimed cost savings are not reached and their energy and resource TCO suck donkey parts compared to incandescents.
6) Statism does the fail thing once more.
7) Statism apologists scramble to make rationalizations. Cue:
perverse incentives created by the state result in sub optimal behavior of the market.
Actually the reason for the low quality incandescent bulbs is lower demand, less research into them and everyone knowing there is not much future there. They are a niche market. There will be junk ones and good high end ones as well.
So far incandescents have not been taxed and here the POWER COMPANY is subsidizing CFL's so they can avoid building an expensive power plant. I got 4 CFL's for $1.99 last week.