Chevy Volt a Failure - GM to Layoff 1,300

Oil companies don't really receive many benefits like that, that I know of. They have to drill where the oil is, sell where there is demand, and they usually headquarter where they can minimize how much everyone tries to tax them.

Again, contrast that to Tesla for more than a decade. It didn't earn anything -- it was a cash incineration machine. A tax deduction or tax rebate or whatever you want to call it would have been useless to the company. It had no earnings to use that deduction against. It was literally handed billions of dollars at the expense of all of us that helped keep it around. And it was even more of a "survival of the unfittest" story than that, because it was coupled with an insanely loose monetary environment that allowed it to pile up billions of dollars of debt (it is still pretty indebted) and dilute its stock price without being punished, in order to keep raising money to blow through.

 

Our Navy (EU involved also) has actually been trying to protect shipping of Nikes (and everything else) too from those Houthi attacks lately.

But that still isn't a subsidy. There is going to be pretty inelastic demand for oil whether we deploy our military that way or not. That is why it is such a great business .Their business thrives because the world is thirsty for oil. It's not artificial demand of some sort being stoked by people being subsidized to induce them to buy it.

Absent what you are talking about (military transports) the price of oil might go up. ... it would be more costly for suppliers to get some of the product to people and it would drive up costs. It would make the end product more expensive. People would complain. But that conceivably might actually be even more profitable for the oil companies -- higher prices when demand is really inelastic makes profits soar. That's kind of what happened during the pandemic. ... you had robust demand for oil with all of the "stimulusTM," and supply couldn't keep up. The oil companies were making really good money as the price of their product went up.

The purpose of a military transport wouldn't really be a "subsidy" to the oil company. They don't need it. It's way more about the politicians who control the Navy and the people with pitchforks if their energy costs go up.

 

Take away whatever you are talking about, and empirically ask yourself this. Would those oil companies STILL exist, and would they STILL be insanely profitable (most of the time) if you got rid of whatever you are calling a subsidy?

Honestly, their businesses don't exist (or profit more) due to some subsidy or subsidies. They have one of the most price inelastic products known to mankind. Make the cost of oil higher. ... and the higher price they can charge more than offsets the relatively small drop off in demand. You have seen that in action. Just a year or two ago, we had all of the "record profits" posts on here, about how they were robbing people (who were voluntarily paying the higher prices!).

The narrative that oil companies are subsidized. ... and the implication that they benefit in some way from all the things you can jump to on this. ... has just always been some Orwellian use of language to me. They are not subsidized. Get rid of whatever you are talking about and I honestly wouldn't be surprised if oil companies were MORE profitable than they are. ... even with higher taxes imposed on them by the U.S. Inelastic demand does that.

 

And the oil industry doesn't really benefit (in the aggregate) from either, the way people want to pretend. It doesn't need to be subsidized. There is such strong demand for what they are selling to people and that demand is as inelastic as there is for any product, meaning that if prices go up (what it sounds like those "subsidies" are trying to affect) profits actually go up -- a much higher price plus a much smaller hit to demand.

EVs? They would be a much smaller niche than they even are without the actual subsidies-- i.e. -- someone elsehaving to pay part of the cost for another person to be driving one, or in the case of reality, our government delaying having to force others to pay the cost by adding it to our debt.

 

Oh. I thought you were still trying to say that it's a subsidy. ... no different than how EVs are subsidized. I apologize.

Yes, it's unknowable. So many things are price fixed and distorted by how much our governments have taken over the markets we all live within. What I can say -- without being able to quantify it -- is that our overall well being is worse off for it. The distortions they create get people to act in ways that they wouldn't if they were directly bearing the costs (and benefits) and as a result, the overall pie, so to speak, ends up being smaller.