Posted on 04/08/2015 10:54:33 AM PDT by C19fan
A $70,000 electric car. For $70,000 how many years could you just rent a car from Hertz? :-)
Refundable tax credit: if you subtract the credit from your tax liability and get a negative result, the IRS sends you a check returning the result.
Non-refundable tax credit: if you subtract the credit from your tax liability and get a negative result, you write “0” in your final tax liability and get nothing back (neither as cash nor carryover to subsequent years indefinitely).
Gotta be clear about exactly what you’re referring to. The $5000 and $7500 (nuances apply) tax credits are tax credits, not grants/loans/welfare/etc. I don’t know exactly what Musk got, and would like to know whether it was a tax credit/break (nobody gave him money, he just owed less taxes) vs the redistributive handout you’re insinuating.
That’s a lot of hand-waving conflating a variety of legit, questionable, and vile use/abuse of taxation into a single sweeping accusation.
I’m all for reducing taxes. Tax credits/deductions/breaks are a good thing, insofar as they contribute as possible to the overall goal of reducing taxation (ultimate goal is a universal flat tax, but we’ll have to get what we can along the way there).
I’m all against redistributive taxes. The government should not be writing checks short of purchasing goods/services toward Constitutional ends.
Like to completely miss the point in favor of slinging baseless accusations, don’t you? What part of what I’ve written is anything other than making clear this isn’t “welfare”?
“For $70,000 how many years could you just rent a car from Hertz? :-)”
But then you’d have to drive it...
“The electricity used to charge a battery is NOT free.”
But it is cheap. I pay $1-2 for enough electricity to go 100 miles, charged at home. Using a paid charger costs about $4. Some stores, like Whole Foods, provide chargers which cost nothing to use but is a “loss leader”: if you’re charging an EV in the parking lot, you’re going to spend enough time in the store to buy enough groceries to well more than pay for the “free” electricity.
You buy a Tesla.
The government arranges for you to have $7500 that would otherwise have been in the Treasury.
Does it matter if they arrange that by giving you a tax credit, cutting you a check, or delivering 750,000 pennies on the back of an elephant?
That is just the mechanism. The important fact is that you have money that would have been in the Treasury if you had not jumped through the hoop.
Welfare is Welfare. Get over it. If you want to take the money, take it. Nobody will stop you. You might even be able to talk yourself into feeling good about yourself, as if taking the money out of the Treasury makes you a better person.
Just don’t expect anybody else to be convinced by your rationalizations.
It still amounts to government applying taxpayer money to it.
And a $70k car or higher doesn’t and shouldn’t be eligible for it so that people can feel good about them self.
Plus if Musk had gone the capitalist route and risked his own money with investor backing rather than sticking the taxpayer with it via the loans and various other taxpayer backed goodies he got, I’d respect him.
Instead, the obamabackingpos is yet another tax parasite.
“The government should not be writing checks short of purchasing goods/services toward Constitutional ends.”
Absolutely.
The problem with tax breaks is that they are, in effect, a tax on people not getting the break. If I was selling something and I told you I was giving you a discount for paying cash, I would be actually charging everyone else a fee to use their credit cards. Taxes are being used for the government to encourage or discourage various behaviors. The government should do what you say instead of trying to find ways to make you do what they say.
I don’t see what is so “legit” about bank bailouts. These companies, not all of which ultimately ended up being even American, made risky bets (some of which were government mandated) with the knowledge that if they win, they keep the money and if they lose they don’t have to pay, we do. Who would maintain good business practices under those conditions? Companies that are strong succeed without government help and companies that fail are replaced by ones that are better.
Thank you.
How does it work at the federal level?
Look, Rich is better than poor. And when you are rich, you can take some nice perks like vacations and nicer cars. That is why people want to be rich.
The bad part is that we really don’t want the rich alone to control the government. That is where we try as hard as we can to keep undue influence out of only wealthy hands. But the more resources you have, the more influence you have, and that is a natural fact.
I think it’s the same. IRS differentiates between refundable and non-refundable tax credits, and most anyone using the $7500 credit likely owes the IRS more than that anyway. Don’t think anyone is actually making money (confiscated from other taxpayers) on the deal.
LOL!
I’ve chewed on the tax break imputation for a while, and decided I’m in favor of it. You can “pay” your taxes in the form of doing something deemed (by “will of the people”) beneficial to society, there isn’t always a need to _pay_ the gov’t outright only to have gov’t turn around and spend the money on something you could have done anyway.
There _is_ a fee for using credit cards. Might be beneficial to encourage people to use cash vs the sheer convenience of swiping plastic, so you just don’t charge cash-payers for something they’re not using anyway.
Let’s try this one: in lieu of spending on DHS, the feds could provide an annual $1000 tax credit to anyone who agrees to obtain an M4(gery) at their own cost, consent to annual training, and keep it always accessible within one minute. We wouldn’t really need DHS then, would we? much cheaper and much more effective to let the people handle the task than raising a standing army.
Addressing your off-topic point (and leaving it with this post): I don’t favor bailouts. Take the risk, accept the result, glean accordingly.
But please do not rationalize your purchase by pretending that you will not be availing yourself of a government welfare/subsidy program. If YOU are not paying the full cost of a product; if the manufacturer is not paying his full cost of production (i.e. if your fellow TAXPAYERS are "subsidizing" ANY part of it); then the product does not have a profitable, a self-sustaining market, and those participating in the market for that product are recipients of "welfare" (aka "subsidy").
Don't feel too bad about it, though. Plenty of markets for plenty of products are being propped up by our government with our tax dollars. It is a shame, though, to see a person who otherwise seems very rational trying to explain away the taxpayer subsidies (aka government "welfare") associated with a particular product, simply because he happens to personally like that product.
Regarding my comment on the nonexistence of "free" electricity, I made no claims regarding the cheapness, or lack thereof, of electricity. The sole purpose of my comment was to point out to another person that the "free" electricity he said he could get at a public garage is NOT free.
SOMEONE is paying for that electricity. At a public garage, TAXPAYERS would be the people who are paying for that electricity. In other words, the so-called "free" electricity represents yet another subsidy/welfare program associated with electric cars.
By the way, I have a short commute. I am seriously considering buying an all-electric motorcycle to use on that commute. They strike me as being ideally suited for that purpose. However, if I do purchase one of them, and if "tax credits" are available for them, I will NOT try to pretend that the cost of that bike was NOT subsidized by my fellow taxpayers.
“But the more resources you have, the more influence you have, and that is a natural fact.”
But your “influence” should not be able to buy regulations that punish your competition, or regulations that require people buy your product, and it should never be able to buy free money from the government.
In capitalism, people that are spending their own money do a lot of research and give capital to companies that have a good business model. In crony capitalism, as was the case in Obama’s green energy “investments” money is handed out to companies based on their political influence. Elon Musk appears to be a smart businessman, but the governments investment in him was not based on that, it was based on his political connections. For every Tesla, there is at least one Solyndra.
I’m saying the only way to keep people from buying the government is to reduce the amount of power the government has to sell.
People are “making” money because they are being excused from paying the full cost of a particular product from a particular manufacturer. And they are being excused from paying that full price because the government has decided to show favoritism towards a particular product or manufacturer.
So Tesla Motors should have been required to succeed or fail entirely on their own?
I agree.
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