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Can we wean Elon Musk off government support already?

thehill.com

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Re: Can we wean Elon Musk off government support already?

#2

Post by sp332 »

Ugh, what a bad-faith argument. The whole reason government puts subsidies on things is to encourage those things. The article starts with the assumption that market distortion is always has a bad outcome, but it's going to have to back that up. It also assumes (at the end) that our representatives in Congress can't possibly really be representing us.

The rebates and tax cuts are working as intended. For example, by paying $7,500 for a certain class of electric vehicle, we tip the balance for people considering buying a somewhat less expensive internal combustion car. Just by tipping the scales, we shift a significant fraction of the demand from IC to electric, which makes a huge difference in the market, and therefore capital investment in manufacturing. Just doing this for a few years gets us decades ahead of where we would be in terms of electric vehicle technology.

Corruption is always possible but it's not a given. For an old rebuttal, Musk's "The House Always Wins" essay still applies. https://www.tesla.com/blog/house-always-wins

P.S. The tax credit already get phased out above 200,000 vehicles per manufacturer, so it's not going to apply to all 500,000 pre-orders (even assuming they all become sales). https://energy.gov/eere/electricvehicles/electric-vehicles-t...

Re: Can we wean Elon Musk off government support already?

#5

Post by merpnderp »

sp332 wrote: post #2

Ugh, what a bad-faith argument. The whole reason government puts subsidies on things is to encourage those things. The article starts with the assumption that market distortion is always has a bad outcome, but it's going to have to back that up. It also assumes (at the end) that our representatives in Congress can't possibly really be representing us. The rebates and tax cuts are working as intended. For example, by…

I'm not saying the government subsidies are wrong, but a counter case might be what if the government subsidized scientifc GPU's at the turn of the century over gaming GPU's? Would gaming have grown as big as it is without modern GPU's targeted at gaming? Would we have gotten such cheap GPU compute power without the massive investment in gaming? Would the government subsidy have ended up hurting long term advancement in GPU's?

Re: Can we wean Elon Musk off government support already?

#8

Post by aianus »

wnevets wrote: post #3

Can we wean oil & farm companies off of government support first?

Without enough domestic farms and oil fields the US would be extremely vulnerable to foreign sanctions etc. in times of conflict. The subsidies are intended to keep some of these unprofitable operations running domestically.
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