Chevy Volt a Failure - GM to Layoff 1,300

This thread has moved from posts pointing out that the car was overengineered due to the government handouts, ended up overpriced as a result, and that the market for it has been anemic. That got every kitchen sink argument thrown back, until it was hard to argue, since the car has been an abysmal failure.

In the last few pages, the goalposts have shifted to, "Well, yeah, it is government subsidized on taxpayers back. ... but what about <name some other area of government fucking around with markets>?

False equivalencies are diversion tactics. We were not talking about defense spending. We were talking about the Chevy Volt. When the conversation took a turn some people didn't like, out came the false equivalencies.

And in the case of the last example, well it isn't about government subsidies that make gas cheaper in America than in Britain (and other European countries). So it's not even a good false equivalency. Gas is more expensive in Britain because they tax it at a much higher rate than we do. They tax gas at about half the retail price. In Germany, the price of gas is about twice as high as it is in the U.S., and taxes make up 63 percent of the retail gas price. In the U.S. the tax portion of the price of gas averages about 11 percent, in comparison.

So no, as you wrongly suggested, we don't "spend money in tax dollars" to "keep gas" at $3.50 a gallon. We actually tax gas, which makes it more costly than it would be without that taxation.

 

1) Abysmal failure to date, and according to those stories the last few days, an abysmal failure in that they have pushed so much money into this thing and they still can't give away these cars at huge losses, that there is no hope it isn't going to be anything but a financial failure that costs GM billions.

2) I responded to 93's wrong characterization about how gas is somehow subsidized here. He brought up the higher price in Europe wrongly, as his proof that gas is subsidized here. I pointed out that gas is taxed in both places (gas is not subsidized by taxpayer dollars in America. It is taxed). It is just taxed a much higher rate in Europe. I answered his post. Now you are taking it on your own unrelated tangent about what Europe supposedly does with those tax dollars. Given that there isn't a European country that is fiscally sound, and not running at a deficit (many of those countries can barely meet their obligations), I don't know how you can say that they are actually using taxes to pay for anything. They are in massive debt. But fine. My answer to 93 still stands -- factually.

3) I didn't say Tesla is a Ponzi scheme. I said the kind of fraud they legally are getting away with is akin to a Ponzi scheme. Please characterize me correctly. I said if it wasn't for Federal guaranteed loans that allowed it to raise money in the equity markets, and if it had been a private lender that had put up that money, the way that company has been run would have the SEC all over it right now. But they have government Rabbis looking out for them, who don't want to look like they wasted half a billion dollars in yet another act of cronyism in trying to handpick businesses to support. Since our government in its largesse has handed it half a billion dollars in loans, Tesla has leveraged it into an offering in the equity markets. They made a ton of promises about production. They haven't even come close to meeting them. To date, since then, they have delivered less than 200 cars of the thousands they promised as a result of that loan and their equity offering. They have produced fewer than 300 of them. They have blown through all of that money, and can't make interest payments (forget about repaying the loans) back to our government. We are all going to end up eating that money. That wasn't a false equivalency. We were talking about electric cars. The conversation got into their viability. Tesla is an electric car company. Not government-controlled, the way GM became, but one given a lot of taxpayer money in an act of cronyism similar to what GM has benefited from. It was quite analogous and fit into this thread, which has been a conversation about the viability of electric cars. You are arguing that Tesla doesn't fit into that discussion?