The bottom line is that you still don't have a solution. Neither do I, but I think one is possible if we don't go abusing people by pauperizing them with taxes designed to lower energy consumption. We just need to provide all the energy people want, so they're not concentrating on simply paying to get to work and paying to keep the house warm or cool. If those people that are capable of finding a solution are allowed to have joyful and plentiful lives, they may in turn be able to formulate the ultimate solution to this and other things.
Yes, a single tech _will_ replace petroleum because it has to. Right now, there seems to be exactly two ways to convert potential energy into kenetic energy that can power a vehicle down a road and they are burning something or magnetism, as in electric motors. Electricity will be the single tech that replaces petroleum for everything except possibly flight at jet-power speeds. We don't know how to do that with magnetism yet, I think.
Offset for low income people? Where's that supposed to come from? You one of those guys that thinks the rich can provide all $$$ to run everything? Hint: They're not THAT rich:
They just don't have enough money to lift us all out of our miseries.
The right answer is to keep drilling, only faster, and keep everyone living well so those of us that may be capable of finding an answer are not occupying all their time trying to figure out how to live on what's left after the gov't steals their money with some nonsense like a carbon tax.
A carbon tax? You think that a carbon tax is the answer?
No, the answer isn't going to come out of legislation. The answer is going to come out of a laboratory somewhere, and it will be an energy solution that doesn't emit.
But a tax will just create millions more that fall below the poverty line, as the cost of energy skyrockets and they can't even pay to get to work in their cars, and their work further moves out of the USA and to places that aren't trying to sabotage their industries with taxes.
You know what WOULD make a difference? We should kill the income taxes dead, all of them, and then industry would build 100's of 1,000's of factories in the United States. And, thanks to fracking and horizontal drilling, we would be able to provide cheap electricity for them to run those factories on natural gas fired electricity. THAT would get a lot of manufacturing out of places like India and Chna because they still tax their industry. Something like THAT would make a difference, and retain enough prosperity that we could use much more readily available funds to perfect the ultimate solution to the problem. Maybe that solution would be something like this:
Pre-industrial levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide within 10 years, as well as more elemental carbon sans things like mercury and radioactive components so it could be burned in what would otherwise be coal-fired generators, and not add enough CO2 to undo everything.
That's just an example of what might be. There could be other solutions that would do the same thing that we just haven't heard about, or something that some smart guy in a lab somewhere is going to get to work as a prototype next Tuesday. But you can't kill the economy with a carbon tax and expect the money to materialize to develop the process I linked to, nor pay the guy in the lab to discover the Tuesday process that will save us all. The people that would be trying to do that will be home, trying to set the heat lower and not drive anywhere because gasoline and heating oil are so expensive. (BTW, I've already come to that point with a $683 oil bill for one month last month - geothermal heat will be a reality here by next Christmas. Quote is $25K - $30K. Yeah, I'll use the subsidy.) (But you don't need to make petroleum any higher than it already is, there's too many in poverty already.
It _adds_ to dead birds, rather than trading places with glass, cars, etc. How they compare will be determined by how far out we want to build wind. If we go 100% - 150% of our requirements, and account for the staggering increase in those requirements from not only powering the grid that exists, but adding to it electric vehicles to 100% convert the highways to electricity, there probably won't be a square inch of sky that you can photograph in the USA that doesn't have a wind generator occluding it.
Oh yeah? How do you make a car go down the road on nuclear electricity? You can't just use a long extension cord, you need a battery. So far, the battery tech is too expensive and too limited to replace all the internal combustion engined vehicles there are. You can get it to work for a price in a car like a Tesla, but your Ford F150 with an electric motor is probably going to have a 12 mile range with current battery tech.
Yeah, its as safe as fracking most likely, so its something we should be doing.
Dead birds are dead birds. Those big paddles in the sky are going to have an effect, and if there are LOTS of paddles in the sky, then there's going to be LOTS of dead birds. I really ain't that all broke up about it, EXCEPT if it does rid the skies of all the birds. Don't think it'll happen at any concentration of wind machines, having birds live normal length lives might be a thing of the past.
Yes, wind and solar. Solar thermal can work at night if the thermal part is used to heat something that stays hot all night. Wind is 24 hours as long as there's a good enough breeze. But these things are EXPENSIVE. If it was just a matter of all the well-to-do people just having to cough up some more so that they are not quite so well-to-do, it might fly. But there are something like 49 million people in poverty in the USA, and they cannot stand having their electric bills double. They need cheap to survive. Living in poverty is said to take about 6.5 years off your life, and if you do it as a kid, the 6.5 years are not recoverable with subsequent prosperity. We can't induce more poverty while chasing this idea.
No, it is NOT true that the longer we wait, the more expensive it will be to ramp up solar. It is exactly the opposite.
Wind has an extremely small penetration in the electrical generation market right now. If you ramp it up to 100% or more to account for windless days, there's nowhere you're not going to be able to see one (do you WANT a landscape like that?) and there will be billions of dead birds.
You say we can't drill arbitrary places to find geothermal, and that may eventually prove to be true, but don't you think we ought to be trying? Such a thing, if perfected, will last longer than the sun itself.
I kinda like solar-thermal, but try to make it work in the midwest where normal == overcast. Same problem for PV.
Where the H did that come from? There's other things to tax, don'tcha know? We didn't even have income taxes 'til 1913 and were getting along just fine until Democrats insisted on being able to steal people's money directly. We even had the golden age of the 1880's, which was our greatest economic expansion of our entire history. Its no coincidence that there was no income tax at the time.
Its f'n 20 miles to town and I'm 66 years old. Even if I could bike it, I don't have time for that, and would get killed by a drunk within 3 years on the roads around here coming back from my poker games at 1 AM. Bike,. my ass. That won't even solve the problem, either. You need petroleum to grow your food, or if not yours, for the teeming masses in the big cities, you need petroleum to transport it, you need petroleum to heat your homes, and so forth.
And they're / we're doing that because all of the global warming extremists want to wreck prosperity in pursuing actions that will not work. The US simply pauperizing itself in trying to use extremely expensive "clean" energy won't do a damn thing to get India and China to quit digging coal, and we cannot support out population without petroleum anyway.
If you _ever_ outline a course of action that will _increase_ prosperity and solve the problem at the same time, then you MIGHT have a chance of getting the plan approved by all. But until that time, expect opposition even if you show that it is 100% the case. You have to be able to keep everyone alive and still not burn anything. You can't.
Work on geo-engineering solutions instead. Figure out how to remove the CO2 from the atmosphere, either cheaply, or profitably. The STEP process:
if perfected, would have us so rich in elemental carbon as a byproduct that we could fire all our coal-burning power plants with elemental carbon and no mercury or radioactive emissions while introducing no new carbon to the atmosphere. No, THAT would be a solution everyone could support. Research that. Make it work. We'll get behind it because it'll solve the problem and not harm us while doing it.
What are you going to change? 100% nuclear power? Fine, lets do it, but tell me how you first are going to get that power to move cars and trucks down the road, ships across seas and on rivers, airplanes across skies. You can't, and we likely won't be able to do it for 50 years.
The thing to do in the meantime is to research such things as clean energy, while keeping costs of mundane things like transportation and home heating and cooling down to make money available for the research. Raise the price of everything so's (some) people have only enough to survive, while others die, and all resources you might have wanted to use to advance clean energy technology will instead be consumed by just saving those that are starving.
Yeah? What's your solution? We absolutely, positively need petroleum right now in order to exist. Without it, we'd have to fall back to an 1800's agrarian existence, farming with horses and oxen, and OBTW we couldn't produce enough food for the vast majority of people to survive. We need modern farming methods for that, and that requires petroleum to fertilize it, petroleum to work the land, petroleum to move the food, and petroleum to heat homes and so forth.
The only way to NOT use petroleum RIGHT NOW is to kill about 90% of the population, world-wide. Simply making things more efficient isn't going to work, we're already too close to our capabilities for that.
The solution in the short term is to use the best methods to obtain petroleum based products, fracking, to keep costs down so we have enough research money to throw into things like geothermal electricity, battery technology, and geo-engineering solutions to removing CO2 from the atmosphere. That might have a chance. But simply complaining about those who are going about the business of making things better for us NOW is of absolutely no use whatsoever.
Oh, yeah, I forgot. There _is_ _nothing_ wrong with nuclear, but TRY to build more plants. The damned environmental extremists (EEs) oppose that, while other EEs oppose using land for solar and other EEs oppose fracking and more EE's oppose the bird-killing wind turbines and some EE's have gotten the power distribution wires stopped from being built from a solar farm into a California city (San Diego, I think, but its been years and I forget) because there was a forest in between. No progress can really be made except for petroleum, because that is familiar, unless we kill all the environmental extremists. Sign me up for that firing squad, they are the sort of enemies foreign and _domestic_ that would strangle our nation and cast our people into suffering from unmanageable costs of living.
Oh, and I don't consider tidal and wave because it requires even more research than using geothermal, which would be inexhaustible if perfected.
and keep in mind that wind power is a very small portion of the power produced in the country now. Ramp it up to produce 100%, and you're going to have nowhere where you wont be able to see a turbine, and nowhere a bird can fly and expect to live a normal lifetime.
Drilling absolutely should be done for both sustainability and geopolitical reasons. We cannot convert the entire vehicular complement of transportation in this country to electricity for decades, and possibly never if the magic battery is not invented. Still no one knows how to build it. When they do, then we can get on with battery powered cars that can perform like internal combustion engined cars, and semi-trucks and boats / ships too. This may never happen.
And, BTW, fracking has been around since the 40's. Whats you're problem? Are you one of those enviros that opposes everything?
What we have to do is to keep costs down as long as possible, and that means petroleum. Only with the prosperity brought to us by petroleum will we have the research money to possibly perfect something that actually works, be it wind, solar, geothermal, whatever.
And we still have to research geo-engineering because the damn commies in China are NOT going to quit digging coal, ever. We either figure out a way to take the CO2 out of the air in order to reduce its concentration, or figure out how to live with a warmer planet. Maybe put some $$$ behind getting this working:
There was no subsidy. Not stealing people's money with income taxes is not a subsidy, it is just doing the right thing. There should be no income taxes. Repeal16.
Electric cars? Still use fossil fuels. Natural gas would be the easiest, but still has carbon. Try using the petroleum consumption of the USA per year in barrels, find out the BTU per barrel, multiply that by the refining efficiency, then the efficiency of its uses keeping in mind the 35% approximate efficiency of the internal combustion engine, then compute the number of kilowatt hours it takes to match those BTUs, divide by both the efficiency of the electric car battery (abt 90%), and the efficiency of the electric car motor (about another 90%) and then the efficiency of the electric grid at about 93%. Then figure out how you're going to generate all that while remaining carbon free. Try wind, but you probably won't have a bird left alive in the whole country. Solar? How long will it take to ramp that up, and at what cost? Would solar thermal and PV panels double the price of electricity? Probably. Have a $300 / month electric bill for your house now, then you start getting a $600 / month electric bill after solar happens. And, of course, there's the no bird-killing, not as expensive as solar nuclear, but figure 1300 - 1600 new power plants the equivalent size of our largest in Palo Verde, Az. How long do you think it'll get the permits for those? Never? Yeah, never.
Short answer: Research geo-engineering solutions, keep drilling, and keep researching geothermal...
You seriously think the company went bankrupt because they were paying their CEO $10M? Remember, that's $1 / car.
Or could it be the 25 MPG CAFE that, when enacted, the perpetrators in Washington actually said that it would probably bankrupt the Detroit companies? That couldn't have had anything to do with it?
Or in couldn't have been because of the 35% corporate tax rate that they were paying, 2nd highest on the planet at the time, only 2nd to Japan? That couldn't have been it?
And if the CEO were to receive instead $500K / yr, would GM have gotten as knowledgeable and adept a CEO as they had, or would they have gotten a far less experienced person that could only command a $500K salary, because those that were more skilled were pulling down millions of dollars in other large corporations? Maybe GM would have gone bankrupt _sooner_ than they did if they paid their CEO cheaply.
One more time, who does the $10M salary harm? I don't accept it as a reason for the bankruptcy.
The fallacy is in taxing business at all. Businesses don't pay taxes, they collect them from others, who are their customers when they raise their prices to get the money to pay the taxes, their employees when they deny them raises in order to have to have the money to pay the taxes, and their shareholders when they reduce dividends to have enough money to pay the taxes. We need to stop taxing businesses, because businesses are simply tools that Americans use to generate income. Business taxes are like taxing your hammer, it doesn't make sense. Tax instead the things that people buy. It throws the burden of taxation more on the wealthy, because they buy more things, and they be the least harmed, because they are wealthy.
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The bottom line is that you still don't have a solution. Neither do I, but I think one is possible if we don't go abusing people by pauperizing them with taxes designed to lower energy consumption. We just need to provide all the energy people want, so they're not concentrating on simply paying to get to work and paying to keep the house warm or cool. If those people that are capable of finding a solution are allowed to have joyful and plentiful lives, they may in turn be able to formulate the ultimate solution to this and other things.
Yes, a single tech _will_ replace petroleum because it has to. Right now, there seems to be exactly two ways to convert potential energy into kenetic energy that can power a vehicle down a road and they are burning something or magnetism, as in electric motors. Electricity will be the single tech that replaces petroleum for everything except possibly flight at jet-power speeds. We don't know how to do that with magnetism yet, I think.
Offset for low income people? Where's that supposed to come from? You one of those guys that thinks the rich can provide all $$$ to run everything? Hint: They're not THAT rich:
http://townhall.com/columnists...
They just don't have enough money to lift us all out of our miseries.
The right answer is to keep drilling, only faster, and keep everyone living well so those of us that may be capable of finding an answer are not occupying all their time trying to figure out how to live on what's left after the gov't steals their money with some nonsense like a carbon tax.
A carbon tax? You think that a carbon tax is the answer?
No, the answer isn't going to come out of legislation. The answer is going to come out of a laboratory somewhere, and it will be an energy solution that doesn't emit.
But a tax will just create millions more that fall below the poverty line, as the cost of energy skyrockets and they can't even pay to get to work in their cars, and their work further moves out of the USA and to places that aren't trying to sabotage their industries with taxes.
You know what WOULD make a difference? We should kill the income taxes dead, all of them, and then industry would build 100's of 1,000's of factories in the United States. And, thanks to fracking and horizontal drilling, we would be able to provide cheap electricity for them to run those factories on natural gas fired electricity. THAT would get a lot of manufacturing out of places like India and Chna because they still tax their industry. Something like THAT would make a difference, and retain enough prosperity that we could use much more readily available funds to perfect the ultimate solution to the problem. Maybe that solution would be something like this:
http://phys.org/news199005915....
Pre-industrial levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide within 10 years, as well as more elemental carbon sans things like mercury and radioactive components so it could be burned in what would otherwise be coal-fired generators, and not add enough CO2 to undo everything.
That's just an example of what might be. There could be other solutions that would do the same thing that we just haven't heard about, or something that some smart guy in a lab somewhere is going to get to work as a prototype next Tuesday. But you can't kill the economy with a carbon tax and expect the money to materialize to develop the process I linked to, nor pay the guy in the lab to discover the Tuesday process that will save us all. The people that would be trying to do that will be home, trying to set the heat lower and not drive anywhere because gasoline and heating oil are so expensive. (BTW, I've already come to that point with a $683 oil bill for one month last month - geothermal heat will be a reality here by next Christmas. Quote is $25K - $30K. Yeah, I'll use the subsidy.) (But you don't need to make petroleum any higher than it already is, there's too many in poverty already.
Shoot the environmentalists. If we'd have listened to Shakespere, and shot all the lawyers, we'd also be better off now. This is like that.
It _adds_ to dead birds, rather than trading places with glass, cars, etc. How they compare will be determined by how far out we want to build wind. If we go 100% - 150% of our requirements, and account for the staggering increase in those requirements from not only powering the grid that exists, but adding to it electric vehicles to 100% convert the highways to electricity, there probably won't be a square inch of sky that you can photograph in the USA that doesn't have a wind generator occluding it.
Oh yeah? How do you make a car go down the road on nuclear electricity? You can't just use a long extension cord, you need a battery. So far, the battery tech is too expensive and too limited to replace all the internal combustion engined vehicles there are. You can get it to work for a price in a car like a Tesla, but your Ford F150 with an electric motor is probably going to have a 12 mile range with current battery tech.
Yeah, its as safe as fracking most likely, so its something we should be doing.
Dead birds are dead birds. Those big paddles in the sky are going to have an effect, and if there are LOTS of paddles in the sky, then there's going to be LOTS of dead birds. I really ain't that all broke up about it, EXCEPT if it does rid the skies of all the birds. Don't think it'll happen at any concentration of wind machines, having birds live normal length lives might be a thing of the past.
Yes, wind and solar. Solar thermal can work at night if the thermal part is used to heat something that stays hot all night. Wind is 24 hours as long as there's a good enough breeze. But these things are EXPENSIVE. If it was just a matter of all the well-to-do people just having to cough up some more so that they are not quite so well-to-do, it might fly. But there are something like 49 million people in poverty in the USA, and they cannot stand having their electric bills double. They need cheap to survive. Living in poverty is said to take about 6.5 years off your life, and if you do it as a kid, the 6.5 years are not recoverable with subsequent prosperity. We can't induce more poverty while chasing this idea.
The American economy grew by more than 400% from 1865 - 1900:
http://www.shmoop.com/gilded-a...
Clinton do that? Factor for his 8 years vs that 35, that's about 4 to 1, so Clinton would have had to grow the economy by 100%. Didn't happen.
No, it is NOT true that the longer we wait, the more expensive it will be to ramp up solar. It is exactly the opposite.
Wind has an extremely small penetration in the electrical generation market right now. If you ramp it up to 100% or more to account for windless days, there's nowhere you're not going to be able to see one (do you WANT a landscape like that?) and there will be billions of dead birds.
You say we can't drill arbitrary places to find geothermal, and that may eventually prove to be true, but don't you think we ought to be trying? Such a thing, if perfected, will last longer than the sun itself.
I kinda like solar-thermal, but try to make it work in the midwest where normal == overcast. Same problem for PV.
Where the H did that come from? There's other things to tax, don'tcha know? We didn't even have income taxes 'til 1913 and were getting along just fine until Democrats insisted on being able to steal people's money directly. We even had the golden age of the 1880's, which was our greatest economic expansion of our entire history. Its no coincidence that there was no income tax at the time.
Its f'n 20 miles to town and I'm 66 years old. Even if I could bike it, I don't have time for that, and would get killed by a drunk within 3 years on the roads around here coming back from my poker games at 1 AM. Bike,. my ass. That won't even solve the problem, either. You need petroleum to grow your food, or if not yours, for the teeming masses in the big cities, you need petroleum to transport it, you need petroleum to heat your homes, and so forth.
And they're / we're doing that because all of the global warming extremists want to wreck prosperity in pursuing actions that will not work. The US simply pauperizing itself in trying to use extremely expensive "clean" energy won't do a damn thing to get India and China to quit digging coal, and we cannot support out population without petroleum anyway.
If you _ever_ outline a course of action that will _increase_ prosperity and solve the problem at the same time, then you MIGHT have a chance of getting the plan approved by all. But until that time, expect opposition even if you show that it is 100% the case. You have to be able to keep everyone alive and still not burn anything. You can't.
Work on geo-engineering solutions instead. Figure out how to remove the CO2 from the atmosphere, either cheaply, or profitably. The STEP process:
http://phys.org/news199005915....
if perfected, would have us so rich in elemental carbon as a byproduct that we could fire all our coal-burning power plants with elemental carbon and no mercury or radioactive emissions while introducing no new carbon to the atmosphere. No, THAT would be a solution everyone could support. Research that. Make it work. We'll get behind it because it'll solve the problem and not harm us while doing it.
What are you going to change? 100% nuclear power? Fine, lets do it, but tell me how you first are going to get that power to move cars and trucks down the road, ships across seas and on rivers, airplanes across skies. You can't, and we likely won't be able to do it for 50 years.
The thing to do in the meantime is to research such things as clean energy, while keeping costs of mundane things like transportation and home heating and cooling down to make money available for the research. Raise the price of everything so's (some) people have only enough to survive, while others die, and all resources you might have wanted to use to advance clean energy technology will instead be consumed by just saving those that are starving.
That is correct. We believe them to be just more lies.
Yeah? What's your solution? We absolutely, positively need petroleum right now in order to exist. Without it, we'd have to fall back to an 1800's agrarian existence, farming with horses and oxen, and OBTW we couldn't produce enough food for the vast majority of people to survive. We need modern farming methods for that, and that requires petroleum to fertilize it, petroleum to work the land, petroleum to move the food, and petroleum to heat homes and so forth.
The only way to NOT use petroleum RIGHT NOW is to kill about 90% of the population, world-wide. Simply making things more efficient isn't going to work, we're already too close to our capabilities for that.
The solution in the short term is to use the best methods to obtain petroleum based products, fracking, to keep costs down so we have enough research money to throw into things like geothermal electricity, battery technology, and geo-engineering solutions to removing CO2 from the atmosphere. That might have a chance. But simply complaining about those who are going about the business of making things better for us NOW is of absolutely no use whatsoever.
Oh, yeah, I forgot. There _is_ _nothing_ wrong with nuclear, but TRY to build more plants. The damned environmental extremists (EEs) oppose that, while other EEs oppose using land for solar and other EEs oppose fracking and more EE's oppose the bird-killing wind turbines and some EE's have gotten the power distribution wires stopped from being built from a solar farm into a California city (San Diego, I think, but its been years and I forget) because there was a forest in between. No progress can really be made except for petroleum, because that is familiar, unless we kill all the environmental extremists. Sign me up for that firing squad, they are the sort of enemies foreign and _domestic_ that would strangle our nation and cast our people into suffering from unmanageable costs of living.
Oh, and I don't consider tidal and wave because it requires even more research than using geothermal, which would be inexhaustible if perfected.
Bird deaths are no myth:
http://www.cfact.org/2013/03/1...
and keep in mind that wind power is a very small portion of the power produced in the country now. Ramp it up to produce 100%, and you're going to have nowhere where you wont be able to see a turbine, and nowhere a bird can fly and expect to live a normal lifetime.
Drilling absolutely should be done for both sustainability and geopolitical reasons. We cannot convert the entire vehicular complement of transportation in this country to electricity for decades, and possibly never if the magic battery is not invented. Still no one knows how to build it. When they do, then we can get on with battery powered cars that can perform like internal combustion engined cars, and semi-trucks and boats / ships too. This may never happen.
And, BTW, fracking has been around since the 40's. Whats you're problem? Are you one of those enviros that opposes everything?
What we have to do is to keep costs down as long as possible, and that means petroleum. Only with the prosperity brought to us by petroleum will we have the research money to possibly perfect something that actually works, be it wind, solar, geothermal, whatever.
And we still have to research geo-engineering because the damn commies in China are NOT going to quit digging coal, ever. We either figure out a way to take the CO2 out of the air in order to reduce its concentration, or figure out how to live with a warmer planet. Maybe put some $$$ behind getting this working:
http://phys.org/news199005915....
There was no subsidy. Not stealing people's money with income taxes is not a subsidy, it is just doing the right thing. There should be no income taxes. Repeal16.
Electric cars? Still use fossil fuels. Natural gas would be the easiest, but still has carbon. Try using the petroleum consumption of the USA per year in barrels, find out the BTU per barrel, multiply that by the refining efficiency, then the efficiency of its uses keeping in mind the 35% approximate efficiency of the internal combustion engine, then compute the number of kilowatt hours it takes to match those BTUs, divide by both the efficiency of the electric car battery (abt 90%), and the efficiency of the electric car motor (about another 90%) and then the efficiency of the electric grid at about 93%. Then figure out how you're going to generate all that while remaining carbon free. Try wind, but you probably won't have a bird left alive in the whole country. Solar? How long will it take to ramp that up, and at what cost? Would solar thermal and PV panels double the price of electricity? Probably. Have a $300 / month electric bill for your house now, then you start getting a $600 / month electric bill after solar happens. And, of course, there's the no bird-killing, not as expensive as solar nuclear, but figure 1300 - 1600 new power plants the equivalent size of our largest in Palo Verde, Az. How long do you think it'll get the permits for those? Never? Yeah, never.
Short answer: Research geo-engineering solutions, keep drilling, and keep researching geothermal...
Why would I slow down or pull over if a side-view mirror fails? I drove cars just fine way before a lot of them had side mirrors.
No, I'm retired...
Not Ron Paul, he's too isolationist for me. Rand Paul would be OK, tho.
You seriously think the company went bankrupt because they were paying their CEO $10M? Remember, that's $1 / car.
Or could it be the 25 MPG CAFE that, when enacted, the perpetrators in Washington actually said that it would probably bankrupt the Detroit companies? That couldn't have had anything to do with it?
Or in couldn't have been because of the 35% corporate tax rate that they were paying, 2nd highest on the planet at the time, only 2nd to Japan? That couldn't have been it?
And if the CEO were to receive instead $500K / yr, would GM have gotten as knowledgeable and adept a CEO as they had, or would they have gotten a far less experienced person that could only command a $500K salary, because those that were more skilled were pulling down millions of dollars in other large corporations? Maybe GM would have gone bankrupt _sooner_ than they did if they paid their CEO cheaply.
One more time, who does the $10M salary harm? I don't accept it as a reason for the bankruptcy.
So? What's wrong with that? Does it harm anyone?
The fallacy is in taxing business at all. Businesses don't pay taxes, they collect them from others, who are their customers when they raise their prices to get the money to pay the taxes, their employees when they deny them raises in order to have to have the money to pay the taxes, and their shareholders when they reduce dividends to have enough money to pay the taxes. We need to stop taxing businesses, because businesses are simply tools that Americans use to generate income. Business taxes are like taxing your hammer, it doesn't make sense. Tax instead the things that people buy. It throws the burden of taxation more on the wealthy, because they buy more things, and they be the least harmed, because they are wealthy.