Can Elon Musk Be Weaned Off Government Support? (thehill.com)

mi shares an opinion piece written by Jenny Beth Martin via The Hill: A study published in 2015 by The Los Angeles Times revealed that just three of Musk's ventures -- SolarCity Corp. (which manufactured and installed solar energy systems before its 2016 merger with Tesla Motors Inc.), Tesla Motors Inc. (which manufactures electric vehicles), and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX (which builds rocket ships) -- had received $4.9 billion in government subsidies to that point in time. By now, Musk's various ventures have sucked well over $5 billion from government coffers. Worse: in order to induce car buyers to spend their money on electric vehicles, the federal government offers a $7,500 rebate on the purchase price. Some states enhance that rebate with rebates of their own. In California, for instance, purchasers of electric vehicles get a state-funded rebate of $2,500 more.

Slashdot reader mi asks: "Why are you and I subsidizing Elon Musk's products and when will his businesses be able to compete on their own?"

Comments

Slashdot user mi

[Anonymous Coward]

is an idiot. Many companies receive subsidies from the US Government.

Re:Slashdot user mi

[david_bonn]

All good points.

I think the historical analogies have a lot of weight, though.

Probably the most pertinent, and controversial at the time, was the enormous land grants given to transcontinental railroads. The land grants worked out to approximately ten square miles of land for every mile of track. That was on top of generous subsidies for actually laying the track. When the land grants were extended to mineral rights as well it became an even better deal for the Union Pacific. Plus, there was a requirement that these railroads be built with American steel -- which was a boon to Andrew Carnegie and others.

A little bit later, the early electric lighting companies, most notably Edison's, were given generous contracts by local governments to provide lighting for their cities. Much later on, the federal government got into the game and subsidized a great local public power companies.

Early development of aircraft was largely subsidized by nearly every government who could get into the game, Aside from the obvious military applications there was enormous demand for mail service and to a lesser extent for passenger service -- largely supported by governments.

You could argue that the early (post WWII) computer industry was largely subsidized by the US government.

I just have to conclude that the article referenced here sets some kind of world record for abysmal ignorance and willful blindness. It doesn't surprise me that thehill.com would publish such tripe.

Re:Slashdot user mi

[bareman]

This BeauHD user must be losing their ass on their short selling position. Their posts here today reek of desperation.

Re:Slashdot user mi

[ColaMan]

The grants aren't "free money". They're money to develop stuff that might not work out. Eg. the USAF grants to develop a new rocket engine.

You can't call them contracts, because the results aren't a fully delivered product with solid specs behind it. But there's R&D attached to them that is returned to whoever's handing out the money.

And NASA / USAF / DOD and government in general does this all the time - they basically gamble a little bit of their budgets and spread it about in the commercial/academic world to try and advance the state of the art, because the payoff is that those advances make things cheaper in the long run for them.

Replace 'Tesla/Elon' with Oil

[Anonymous Coward]

Do Oil companies need approx. $4Billion/year of tax payer dollars? When can we wean them off government support?

Re:Replace 'Tesla/Elon' with Oil

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't Forget the Corn Ethanol Industry.

Re:Why Indeed...

[TiberiusKirk]

Yes! Why did the government spend hundreds of BILLIONS on concrete pathways all across the fucking country? And hundreds of billions more to build the oil/gasoline infrastructure? My horse got along just fine without all that shit! Fucking morons.

Re:What a BS

[MightyYar]

For SpaceX it's even more disingenuous - they counted governmental launch contracts as "subsidies".

Agreed. Author is doing the typical semantics game where they attempt to redefine common vocabulary to make you see just how bad it all is because they aren't contracts for goods and services, but really just SUBSIDIES - big ugly SUBSIDIES. Both left and right play this ridiculous game because they get no traction when they use regular language to describe things that people are pretty OK with. They want to stoke outrage.

Anyway, these launch "subsidies" are saving the government quite a bit of money over the old ways, so I'm okay with these "subsidies".

Can big Oil be weaned off USGovernment Support?

[OFnow]

You would think that 100 years of US Government support that the Oil companies could be weaned off of the billions in special tax and other benefits give them every single year. The benefits should go to companies taking us to the 21st century OFF of oil. Such as Tesla and Elon Musk's other ventures. Oops. DL;DR

Worse?

[HeckRuler]

Worse: in order to induce car buyers to spend their money on electric vehicles, the federal government offers a $7,500 rebate on the purchase price.

Is that bad? Because not too long ago our national security was at risk since OPEC had us by the balls over a resource that we depended upon but could not produce ourselves. And as gas prices rose and applies economic pressure on everyone it bust bubbles causing a massive financial econopocalypse. The sort that hadn't been seen since the great depression.

We launched TRIllion dollar WARS over this shit.

Last I checked, there was a temporary spike in US oil production as we squeeze the last few drops out of old wells via fracking, and unlocked some oil from shale. Yay technological improvement. But that doesn't change the fact that cars are running on fossil fuels and ultimately this is not sustainable.

So what do we do? We encourage investment into alternatives. Like electric cars. Which can be powered off of grid power which can, in turn, be powered by renewable sources. So we subsidize electric cars. Would you rather we ban ice cars? Add an ice-tax? Tax fuel prices? Because raising fuel prices worked out so well for us last time.

All that said. If a company specifically targets hoovering up government subsidies, that's generally a bad thing. And there WILL come a time when such encouraging subsidies go away. But you have to examine each program on it's merits or flaws rather than on the whole. Everyone likes to bitch about taxes until you start suggesting programs to cut to reduce them.

Re:Why Indeed...

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Also, I'll believe the author is earnest about killing subsidies, I would have expected a mention of the fossil fuel subsidies too, including sweetheart resource extraction deals on federal lands. Or say Ford's still-unpaid bailout loan from the US government. Or ULA's expensive military satellite launch business. It just strikes me as an easy hit piece rather than an honest means to do away with subsidies.

Elon's gone on record several times saying he'll give up subsidies if everyone else gives up theirs.

You forgot to mention...

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

"Jenny Beth Martin is the co-founder and national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots". So, I'm assuming she doesn't want any government subsidies for anything at all, and wants to reduce our government down to just doing "mutual defense" of the individual states. She also makes around 15K per month for "strategic consulting" and $272,000 salary as President of said Tea Party Patriots...for a total of over $450,000 a year. That's quite a bit of "tea".