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Around 6 MILLION passenger vehicles sold in the US in 2017. So EVs are around 2.5 to 3% of the market. Oh my, they are absolutely CRUSHING it!

Do the math again. Here is a quick reference, notice that the annual GDP/person for Indonesia was $3,817 in 2017, while in the US it was $59,792 in 2017.

Actually the 17 million figure includes commercial vechicles, the number for passenger vechicles seems to be around 6-6.5 million and a competitor approaching 5-10% from being basically at 0% a few years back should scare any company in any market.
See https://countryeconomy.com/bus...

So, what was the problem again?

From the paper:

to >$1
trillion that would be required to install 12 hours of storage in
the US

Agreeing with your numbers, we would need greater than 1.5 trillion dollars for this system to reach 80% renewable.

The US last year had a GDP of about 19.5 trillion dollars.

However, the total taxable income of the US, taxed at an average rate of just under 30%, brought in 1.66 trillion last year.

That means, to pay for this system within a year all we would have to do is nearly double everyone's income tax. Of course that does not include distribution, maintenance costs, massive expansion of mining, transportation, and manufacturing industry to make the goods necessary for this project nor replacing all EOL equipment equating to total cost turnover every 15-20 years. 100% more taxes now, 6% more taxes later, forever, all of it going to whomever lawmakers choose to give it to.

This in the best-case scenario where there are zero budget overruns, inefficiencies, graft, and notice no mention of profit. All the people working in this monumental effort are not accounted for, only the cost of the goods they produce. We all know how often best-case economics work out.

That is the problem.

They also only talk about percentage, not absolute numbers. The article does mention that Norway only has a population of 5.3 million though.

This shows they Norway only has a market for about 200k vehicles per year.

The US market is about 17600k vehicles per year for comparison. This suggests that the US has almost 200k electric vehicles a year sold - so a greater total number than Norway.

So I guess the US is not doing too bad in aggregate, even without crazy subsidies, but we're doing really poorly as a market share.

I'd add three things here, which may not actually contradict anything you believe: 1. Almost all governments carry debt; the ones that are close to having no debt are among the least prosperous, and 2. If you're someone who disproportionately benefits from the debt-financed spending then for you to support higher inflation (in order to allow more debt-financed spending) may be entirely rational, and 3. it's hard to know who benefits most from debt-financed spending because it's hard to separate expenditures into "debt-financed" and "non-debt-financed".

One place to look to identify what an "acceptable" level of per debt GDP might be is the level below which the U.S. can maintain the highest possible sovereign debt rating from the various agencies. Countries currently rated AAA by Moody's, using the most recent free data I could find, along with their current per GDP central government debt (2013 data):

United States: 106.5%
Germany: 79.8%
Australia: 35.9%
Canada: 93.6%
Switzerland: 45.3%
Denmark: 59.3%
Luxembourg: 33.5%
Netherlands: 87.7%
Norway: 39.6%
New Zealand: 38.1%
Sweden: 48.3%
Singapore: 104.7% (had to get this from a different source)

It's clear that among AAA-rated sovereigns the U.S. is near the top debt-wise. To draw more in line with the other members of that group it would need to get its per GDP debt down to around 80% at most.

It also pays to look at countries that are highly developed but not AAA rated. This helps the debt level necessary to guarantee an AAA rating. The previous exercise helped to identify the level needed in order to preclude an AAA rating. Here are some highly developed non-AAA rated countries and their debt levels:

United Kingdom: 103.1%
France: 116.1%
Japan: 232.5%
Austria: 89.5%
Belgium: 105.4%
Finland: 70.1%
Iceland: 91.3%
South Korea: 39.0%

Given S. Korea, it looks like there's essentially no debt level that guarantees a AAA rating. However, if the U.S. were to get down below 70% (i.e. Finland) then it would be pretty close to guaranteed.

It's worth noting that, based on what he's promised so far, Trump looks to be no friend to debt/deficit hawks.

"artists would do art"

If it fit within The Party Lines.

"the sick would work to get healthy"

Soviet Union has lagged behind Western countries in terms of mortality and life expectancy since the late 1960s
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia#Life_expectancy"

And yet the GDP per capita in the USSR for 1982 was $5,000, compared to $14,400 for the U.S.A.
http://countryeconomy.com/gdp/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

If you're going to make an argument for Socialism, using the U.S.S.R. as an example is a poor choice.