Ex-SolarCity employees: We were fired after reporting millions in fake sales

Tax reform means my organically growing startup gets to keep 33% more of our profit to reinvest back into the company, which has meaningfully impacted our annual budget and growth trajectory.

VC funded startups get the advantage of growing ahead of profit, and booking tax losses which they can carry forward.

Bootstrapping means growth driven by profit, which necessitates paying income taxes on the ever growing cash balance which flows from growing revenues & expenses (e.g. always having 3 months operating expenses in the bank)

> Oh then, is the subsidy for fossil fuels and roads driving increased intensity of hurricane storms?

I am unable to reply to this directly due to comment depth.

Public highways provide certain economic incentives. Land that would be of marginal utility due to transportation costs without public highways now has greater economic utility. This utility provides economic incentives to private automobiles to capitalize on that land. These public highways create traffic and pollution via suburban sprawl that would otherwise be much less. Public utilities also help subsidize suburban sprawl.

Increased economic destruction by hurricanes (whether worsened by fossil fuels or not) is due to government providing economic incentives to construct in coastal areas subject to hurricane damage. The federal government subsidizes flood insurance for properties in these areas, make the actual cost of ownership lower for the developers and higher for others (tax payers). Perhaps it's cheaper to not erect suburban neighborhoods in areas prone to flooding in the first place.

It's all interconnected. Government subsidies in their various forms impact economic decisions for better or for worse.

> If you think so then what should we do with the increased destruction of property who at perhaps only peripherally participated in that subsidy?

Don't subsidize the reconstruction of properties damaged by hurricanes and flooding. The market will equalize the situation by 1) Insurance will be more expensive 2) Property value will decrease due to increased insurance cost (total cost of ownership) 3) Builders will be highly incentivized to build more hurricane resistant buildings in order to obtain lower insurance rates 4) Hurricanes will have less economic impact due to the aforementioned facts

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Rationality, in the economic sense, doesn't mean making objectively correct decisions as perceived from the outside. It means to make decisions in the furtherance of a particular subjective goal. Making decisions that later turn out to be counter to those ends does not mean that person was behaving irrationality, just that they were wrong.

In other words, economically irrational actors are individuals who act consistently against their own self interest, even as they perceive it. Almost no one is irrational in that sense.

It's a loose definition, but it's all that is needed to make markets functional.

> Increased economic destruction by hurricanes (whether worsened by fossil fuels or not) is due to government providing economic incentives to construct in coastal areas subject to hurricane damage.

No, infrastructure built to hurricane standards 50 years ago might be perfectly strong to stand against current storms of the time. If increased storm strength is cause by fossil fuels (and that likelyhood is strongly supported by scientific studies), then the fossil fuels (with or with subsidies) will have incurred costs to a lot of other externalized actors. Shouldn't that industry have to pay?

> Don't subsidize the reconstruction of properties damaged by hurricanes and flooding.

By leaving "the market" to contend with increased hurricane resistance alone you have just caused increased expenses for everyone building homes for ignoring fossil fuel externalities (some of which was encouraged by gov't subsisdy). And it's not just homes, it's maybe reworking entire metropolitan areas sewer or housing zones.

All of this underlines that the practice of "economics" has no such neutral starting point. Any action, even the action of letting "the market" decide is a social and political decision of helping some parties over others (or, better, helping many parties together). And these decisions often can't be disaggregated into neat isolated and individualized transactions or responsibilities.