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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (631149)	10/10/2011 3:30:52 PM
From: longnshort	4 Recommendations Respond to of 1579893

"benefits the environment" how does it do that, the car runs on coal

To: tejek who wrote (631149)	10/10/2011 4:39:44 PM
From: one_less	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1579893

Did you buy one?

To: tejek who wrote (631149)	10/10/2011 5:26:48 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1579893

>>> Its a new industry that cuts our dependency on oil and benefits the environment. Why not encourage the industry as much as possible? In that case, why limit the payment arbitrarily to a few thousand dollars? Why not just agree that when someone wants a new car if they'll get a Volt, the government will just buy it for them outright? Wouldn't that provide even more benefits for our environment and reduce our dependency on foreign oil even more? The answer, of course, is that that would be 4x or 5x more stupid than paying for 1/4 or 1/5 of the cost. These vehicles cannot and will never have a material impact on our oil dependency.

To: tejek who wrote (631149)	10/13/2011 10:24:32 AM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1579893

Why not encourage the industry as much as possible? Because there is no good way to know ahead of time if it is the right solution. And if its receiving hefty effective subsidies then even "success" (which hasn't occurred at this point) still doesn't indicate it was really the right solution. If the government has to intervene (which is always a rather questionable idea), then it should intervene by adding to the cost of the externalities that it thinks is a problem. I'd rather it not intervene at all, but a gas tax increase or a more general "carbon tax" (ideally with cuts in other taxes to make the change "revenue neutral" or perhaps in exchange for some spending reduction as part of a budget deal), would make a lot more sense if the government feels it has to intervene. Then your penalizing what you see as the problem, and letting the market come up with something else to evade the penalty, rather than having the government pick a winner. As for cutting our dependency on oil - Not in any significant way. And I say that not just because the numbers are so low now, even if sales equaled the top selling car in the US, it wouldn't have a very significant impact, we would still be very "dependent" on oil, and also on oil imports. Benefiting the environment - Possible, but not certain. The creation of the batteries involves energy use and toxic materials.