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Ive recommended to the president that the US government deposit a trillion dollars in a bank account every year and buy a tesla series s for ten thousand US families with a plan to convert small town USA to electric cars one community at a time. This way a town with ten thousand or less families would be selected each year (actually the number would increase by ten thousand families every year) and the whole community tesla'd up. Within ten years fifty five small communities could be reduced in their dependance on fossil fuels.
Its of economic benifit in that it means in each community ten thousand families are saving ten thousand dollars a year each they would have spent on fuel so here is a rise of five billion, five hundred million dollars in fuel savings over ten years and ten trillion dollars as a bulk payment the US can pay off its debts at the end of ten years.
Thoughts?
Whose taxes are paying for those cars?
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YD has no idea how big a trillion is. Or how US debt works.
Until a practical sedan sized electric car is made that will allow travel of 500 miles within a 12 hour period, the US consumer is not going to be interested.
Americans drive long distances on a regular basis.
If you want to remove the dependency on oil, you are better off working out a safe hydrogen burning car, and a clean way to produce hydrogen gas in large quantities.
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No, they don't.
Most people don't drive more than 40 miles a day. Even in the country.
" A regular basis" doesn't mean "daily." The problem is that even if you only drive 500 miles per day four times a year -- visiting Grandma for Christmas, or attending a wedding -- that still makes an electric car impractical.
Train service in most of the States is literally nonexistent. Planes are prohibitively expensive for families. Renting a car isn't practical -- not enough supply to scale. Own a car just for long trips? Too expensive.
Vod unfortunately has it right.
Ive recommended to the president that the US government deposit a trillion dollars in a bank account every year and buy a tesla series s for ten thousand US families with a plan to convert small town USA to electric cars one community at a time. [/QOTE]
The price of a Tesla model S is about $70,000 US. Ten thousand of these (one per family) would be $700,000,000 --- seven hundred million dollars, less than a tenth of one percent of a trillion dollars per year.
As I said, YD has no idea how large a trillion dollars is. The interest from a trillion dollar donation would be enough to support this rather silly plan, if a trillion could be found.
Of course, this "trillion dollar" would also be enough to totally destroy the US economy under normal circumstances. (It's actually close to the amount generated by the Fed as QE3, prior to the recent taper.)
Its of economic benifit in that it means in each community ten thousand families are saving ten thousand dollars a year each they would have spent on fuel so here is a rise of five billion, five hundred million dollars in fuel savings over ten years
So, in order to provide six billion dollars in fuel savings, you've just spent ten trillion?
and ten trillion dollars as a bulk payment the US can pay off its debts at the end of ten years.
That's not how debt works. The ten billion dollars that used to buy these cars -- at approximately a hundred thousand percent markup over retail cost, by the way -- comes from unsupported deficit spending, or in other words ADDS to the national debt. Trying to use this "as a bulk payment" to pay off the US debt is at best like using your credit card to pay your grocery bill. More accurately, it's like using a credit card to remodel your kitchen; in theory, you've spent money on buying an additional asset base, but in practical terms, you've simply thrown money away that you're highly unlikely ever to recover. (As a matter of fact, it's much worse than a kitchen remodel. You usually get about 50% of your costs back from a kitchen remodel when you sell. Your own math suggests you get about 0.55% of your costs back from this plan.)
And, of course, the government will be paying interest on this borrowed money; typically at a rate of about 1-3% per year.
So, as seems to be fairly typical for YD's get-poor-quick schemes, this is completely impractical to the point of innumeracy.
I expect him to rediscover the cat-and-rat-farm next.
Thoughts?
93% of all driving days are within the roundtrip range of the typical plug-in electric according to the Department of Transportation's 2009 survey.
Great. That means that 7% of the days -- approximately once every two weeks -- I need a non-electric car.
Now there are people who exceed that a matter of course.
Yes. The problem is that those people are, in fact, "almost everyone."
Then again, modern EVs like the Tesla Model S do 300 miles on a charge and while it takes almost three days (60 hours) to fully charge an empty battery from a standard wall outlet, a standard 240 Volt (stove, dryer, etc) outlet will charge it from dead in under 10 and the 24V transformer will do it in 4. Tesla's charger stations will charge a dead battery in an hour and a half. Tesla is also setting up for battery swaps at their charging stations, which will bring the time to go from dead to full to 90 seconds.
Great. So what you're suggesting is that when the infrastructure is built, electric cars will be competitive.
Unfortunately, this infrastructure has not been built yet. I know of no Tesla charging station, planned or fully built, along the long-haul routes I usually drive, and it's not really practical for me to drive 100 miles out of my way. I don't know of any gas stations offhand that provide dryer outlets for me to recharge from, and I'm not sure how you're planning on getting me to Grandma's house in a single day.
500 miles... Pfft. Sure, let's hold EVs to higher standards than petroleum ones.
Nope. I'm holding the electric car to exactly the same standard as my petroleum one. i want to be able to leave home and drive to Grandma's house in under a day.
I can do that today in a gasoline car. I couldn't do that 100 years ago, of course, because the gas stations weren't there (although I could carry enough gasoline to make it in jerricans if I needed to.). 100 years from now, there may be unobtainium fueling stations along the round, or the car may operate on some new fuel that gets 10,000 miles to the gram and cars are sold with a 200,000 mile range from the factory.
Very few people will invest in a technology that may, someday, let them do what they need or want to do now if there's a capacity today. I'm not going to build an airstrip behind my house in case someone actually brings a flying car to market. But I'm similarly not going to buy a rather expensive alternative car to sit next to the one I am going to need to keep anyway.
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Ive recommended to the president that the US government deposit a trillion dollars in a bank account every year and buy a tesla series s for ten thousand US families with a plan to convert small town USA to electric cars one community at a time. [/QOTE]
The price of a Tesla model S is about $70,000 US. Ten thousand of these (one per family) would be $700,000,000 --- seven hundred million dollars, less than a tenth of one percent of a trillion dollars per year.
As I said, YD has no idea how large a trillion dollars is. The interest from a trillion dollar donation would be enough to support this rather silly plan, if a trillion could be found.
Of course, this "trillion dollar" would also be enough to totally destroy the US economy under normal circumstances. (It's actually close to the amount generated by the Fed as QE3, prior to the recent taper.)
Its of economic benifit in that it means in each community ten thousand families are saving ten thousand dollars a year each they would have spent on fuel so here is a rise of five billion, five hundred million dollars in fuel savings over ten yearsSo, in order to provide six billion dollars in fuel savings, you've just spent ten trillion?
and ten trillion dollars as a bulk payment the US can pay off its debts at the end of ten years.That's not how debt works. The ten billion dollars that used to buy these cars -- at approximately a hundred thousand percent markup over retail cost, by the way -- comes from unsupported deficit spending, or in other words ADDS to the national debt. Trying to use this "as a bulk payment" to pay off the US debt is at best like using your credit card to pay your grocery bill. More accurately, it's like using a credit card to remodel your kitchen; in theory, you've spent money on buying an additional asset base, but in practical terms, you've simply thrown money away that you're highly unlikely ever to recover. (As a matter of fact,...
As I said, and will say again for the goblins up the back, a trillion dollars comes with three zeroes more than a billion dollars. You do understand this trillion is real money in tax dollars...? Sticking a trillion dollars in a bank account and getting interest on it is feasable. We wouldnt be spending the trillion, merely spending the interest on it...so the trillion could very well be used to pay off debt once the collection hits ten trillion dollars.
So the tesla costs 70 thousand. Fine. I was using one hundred thousand as a place holder anyhow.
He's not spending the trillion, he is putting it in an interest bearing account and using the interest to fund his plan. Which is why the number of cars purchased each year increases. Then at the end he has 10 trillion in the bank and 550,000 electric cars added to the US fleet. (Likely more given the economics of scale and improved production technology over 10 years development)
Then he spends the 10 trillion in the bank on paying down the national debt. Most of that wasn't really clear in his posts, but it's all there.
He's not spending the trillion, he is putting it in an interest bearing account and using the interest to fund his plan.
That's spending the trillion.
Contrary to popular belief, the US does not have random trillion-dollar bills lying around to be "deposited" in interest bearing accounts. It gets a certain amount of money from taxes and spends a certain amount of money, and has the ability to create money via the Fed.... but that "created" money simply acts to dilute the existing money supply; it's not new money. In rough terms, if the government, for example, were simply to double the money supply, the effect would not be limitless wealth for the government to spend, but instead inflation on the order of 100%, as twice as many dollars were chasing the exact same amount of goods.
Even that ability is limited, because the usual way that money is created is by borrowing it into existence; the Fed buys and sells US treasury bonds that are issued by the US government. If the government needs a trillion more dollars, it issues a trillion dollars worth of T-bills, which are bought either by the Fed or by private investors like you, me, and Goldman Sachs. This, in turn, means that the government is borrowing that money that they get from you, me, and Goldman Sachs, and the money the government spends comes out of the economy.
Then he spends the 10 trillion in the bank on paying down the national debt.
There is no ten trillion in the bank. Every penny of that ten trillion was added directly to the national debt at the time it was offered. So there's now ten trillion in circulation (mostly paid to Tesla) and ten trillion taken out of circulation to pay Tesla. Add a modicum of interest (that will need to pay the bondholders) and the government is now on the hook for eleven or twelve trillion additional dollars over and above the existing debt from normal government operations. And of course, money will have to be collected in taxes to pay that.
The alternative, of course, is simply to inflate the currency. The government could simply "create" twelve trillion dollars out of thin air, which it doesn't have to repay anyone. But since the total money supply (M2) of the United States is about twelve billion dollars, you're literally doubling the money supply, with the attendant hyperinflation.
As a fiscal stimulus policy, this may not be a bad thing, depending upon how Keynesian you are. The United States (and indeed the world) economy is in a demand slump right now; people who have money aren't spending it, so goods aren't being produced and people aren't employed. Raising inflation sharply would encourage consumption, stoke demand, and result in higher employment across the board. But giving a trillion dollars to the Tesla company would also strongly distort the economy and probably do more harm than the stimulus would be good. And even a Keynesian would be appalled at the idea of simply pouring money into the economy at this scale without having an exit strategy.
I'm afraid you've just put yourself in the same camp as YD; you don't understand how US debt works. Nor do you know how large a trillion really is.
I would imagine everyone here is smart enough to make your points competently without the personal insults directed at the OP.
I didn't say it was a good idea. Also, presumably, YD's idea includes *not* spending that 28% of the budget on everything else.
I didn't say it was a good idea. Also, presumably, YD's idea includes *not* spending that 28% of the budget on everything else.
I don't grant that presumption. Bear in mind that his initial proposal was to spend one trillion per year to purchase ten thousand cars that he estimated at one hundred thousand dollars apiece in order to save them each ten thousand dollars in fuel.
Budgeted costs: $1,000,000,000,000 in year 1
Planned expenses: $1,000,000,000 in year 1
Return on investment $100,000,000 in year 1
He was also planning on "depositing the money in a bank account." Essentially, he'd be paying T-bill interest rates (currently just under 3%) to get about 1% return.
Money deposited but unspent: $999,000,000,000 in year 1
Interest paid on that money @ 3%: ($29,970,000,000) in year 1
Interest received from deposited money @ 1%: $9,990,000,000 in year 1
Total finance value: ($19,980,000,000) in year 1
The leverage would thus cost him about $20 billion dollars a year. Let's be generous and say he gets an astonishingly good return on this bank account of 2%, and ONLY loses 1% a year -- about 1% of that $1T, or about $10 B for billion dollars in the first year alone. The finance costs of this operation are still about nine times greater than the total return, AND the money still needs to be repaid at the end of Operation Learn Some Economics.
If he actually understood government budgeting, he'd understand why there's no money available for deposit on a large scale.
[Links arms with Sister Toenibbler and forms labor/goblin defense guard around Comrade Dingo; chants]
Din-go! Din-go! Din-go!
[Chants louder]
DIN-GO! DIN-GO! DIN-GO!
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There's a line when things get insulting., Kthulhu. Yds nutty, but entitled to as much respect as the next poster.
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He's right though. If the US economy is incapable of banking a trillion dollars for interest, then I might as well just hold a lottery each year selling two billion tickets at five hundred dollars each and spend four hundred billion dollars buying every household in the largest cities like LA a tesla series s.
He's right though. If the US economy is incapable of banking a trillion dollars for interest, then I might as well just hold a lottery each year selling two billion tickets at five hundred dollars each and spend four hundred billion dollars buying every household in the largest cities like LA a tesla series s.
That would actually be a much better idea. It would still be a mind-bogglingly stupid idea, and might destroy the US economy, but it would be much less likely to destroy the world economy. (Although I wonder again about your math. Two billion tickets @ $500 per ticket clears $1,000 billion dollars. You're spending $400 billion -- less than half of that -- on the cars. What are you doing with the rest of it?)
What would probably happen, of course, is that the people who could least afford the tickets would be the ones who would buy them,.... and that you'd not come anywhere close to producing enough money through the lottery to fund this project on the scale you would like. Bear in mind that two billion tickets would be one ticket for every family in the world, including the starving workers of South Sudan.
However, if you want to actually try something that might work,.... do it on a smaller scale. If you can sell 1000 lottery tickets at $100 each, something that you could probably do relatively easily on, for example, Kickstarter, you would then be able to buy one winner their Tesla. If you can sell 2000 tickets, you can buy two people their Teslas.
But you probably won't do that. That's something that would be meaningful, practical, and accomplishable, but would require work on your part. Much easier instead to petition the White House to do something that you don't even understand to be completely impossible.
No he doesn't.
He's regurgitating ridiculous talking points.
93% of all driving days are within the roundtrip range of the typical plug-in electric according to the Department of Transportation's 2009 survey.
Now there are people who exceed that a matter of course. Then again, modern EVs like the Tesla Model S do 300 miles on a charge and while it takes almost three days (60 hours) to fully charge an empty battery from a standard wall outlet, a standard 240 Volt (stove, dryer, etc) outlet will charge it from dead in under 10 and the 24V transformer will do it in 4. Tesla's charger stations will charge a dead battery in an hour and a half. Tesla is also setting up for battery swaps at their charging stations, which will bring the time to go from dead to full to 90 seconds.
Now, this does require infrastructure, but it's less then gasoline required. Of course, a potentially easier transition isn't to hydrogen, which is already safe and clean but has the same infrastructure issues, but to a mix of strong hybrid (Prius, Volt, etc) and gasoline fuel cell cars.
Put another way:
500 miles... Pfft. Sure, let's hold EVs to higher standards than petroleum ones. I mean, my car gets 500 miles a tank, but I've never seen someone making this sort of argument whose car does anywhere near that.
None of this changes the fact that dingo is, as always, nutters.
You obviously didn't read what I wrote. I didn't want the vehicle to run for 500 miles on a single charge, but within 12 hours. I can easily drive my gasoline powered car more than 500 miles in 12 hours, and have.
As for driving more than 40 miles in a single day, I do that several times a week.
As for the Tesla, I want to see real world test with average people not employed by Tesla. Their previous model statistics were full of lies and distortions.
I suggest that the DOT take some better surveys.
Even so, according to the US Gov EV site only two of these have a 100+ mile range. The Tesla S models and 2014 Toyota RAV4 EV. None of the other vehicles will get me to my parents home. Only the $100k Tesla will get me to a friends apartment, and there are no handy 240V outlets to recharge my car at. (There is no 240V outlet at my home either.)
How much range is lost from running a heater or window defroster? Tomorrow night it is supposed to get to -17 and I will be headed to work. It's supposed to warm up by Tuesday (+7). Plus how much charge is lost due to just the cold weather? battery-powered heating and air conditioning can decrease the car’s range by a third or more and Electric Cars’ Shortcomings. Now if I am losing 1/3 of my charge from running a heater and losing more to it just being cold, how is someone in a city the size of Chicago supposed to get around? (From O'Hare airport to parts of the southside are 30 miles apart.)
Funny in looking for info on range loss from EV heaters, I found this
BMW’s approach is based on several years of field testing with customers of prototype electric vehicles with a range per charge of about 100 miles. The automaker found that range was only a problem with about 10 percent of daily trips.
So BMW found 10% of daily trips to be over 100 miles. Makes you wonder where the 7% for typical range came from. Since BMW is interested in satisfying consumers, I am more likely to believe their numbers.
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He's right though. If the US economy is incapable of banking a trillion dollars for interest, then I might as well just hold a lottery each year selling two billion tickets at five hundred dollars each and spend four hundred billion dollars buying every household in the largest cities like LA a tesla series s.That would actually be a much better idea. It would still be a mind-bogglingly stupid idea, and might destroy the US economy, but it would be much less likely to destroy the world economy. (Although I wonder again about your math. Two billion tickets @ $500 per ticket clears $1,000 billion dollars. You're spending $400 billion -- less than half of that -- on the cars. What are you doing with the rest of it?)
What would probably happen, of course, is that the people who could least afford the tickets would be the ones who would buy them,.... and that you'd not come anywhere close to producing enough money through the lottery to fund this project on the scale you would like. Bear in mind that two billion tickets would be one ticket for every family in the world, including the starving workers of South Sudan.
However, if you want to actually try something that might work,.... do it on a smaller scale. If you can sell 1000 lottery tickets at $100 each, something that you could probably do relatively easily on, for example, Kickstarter, you would then be able to buy one winner their Tesla. If you can sell 2000 tickets, you can buy two people their Teslas.
But you probably won't do that. That's something that would be meaningful, practical, and accomplishable, but would require work on your part. Much easier instead to petition the White House to do something that you don't even understand to be completely impossible.
Its a lottery. The lottery would have prizes and taxes and management costs thus leaving us with four hundred billion dollars to buy families a tesla series s. To do this small scale is insufficient to the scale of social and economic changes needed.
It benefits the economy, not just in corporate growth and jobs, but in reducing household costs spent on petrol which amounts to about ten thousand a year. Spending more making your kids happy and paying off debts increases your psychological wellbeing.
He's right though. If the US economy is incapable of banking a trillion dollars for interest, then I might as well just hold a lottery each year selling two billion tickets at five hundred dollars each and spend four hundred billion dollars buying every household in the largest cities like LA a tesla series s.That would actually be a much better idea. It would still be a mind-bogglingly stupid idea, and might destroy the US economy, but it would be much less likely to destroy the world economy. (Although I wonder again about your math. Two billion tickets @ $500 per ticket clears $1,000 billion dollars. You're spending $400 billion -- less than half of that -- on the cars. What are you doing with the rest of it?)
Graft and corruption. It is being run by the government after all.
What would probably happen, of course, is that the people who could least afford the tickets would be the ones who would buy them,.... and that you'd not come anywhere close to producing enough money through the lottery to fund this project on the scale you would like. Bear in mind that two billion tickets would be one ticket for every family in the world, including the starving workers of South Sudan.
But the South Sudanese need electric cars too.
However, if you want to actually try something that might work,.... do it on a smaller scale. If you can sell 1000 lottery tickets at $100 each, something that you could probably do relatively easily on, for example, Kickstarter, you would then be able to buy one winner their Tesla. If you can sell 2000 tickets, you can buy two people their Teslas.
But you probably won't do that. That's something that would be meaningful, practical, and accomplishable, but would require work on your part. Much easier instead to petition the White House to do something that you don't even understand to be completely impossible.
Like balancing the budget.
Be thankful I have no say in who gets the tesla series s...or you would get the first one.[Chants louder]
DIN-GO! DIN-GO! DIN-GO!
I already have a Lincoln Towncar, thank you, Master Dingo.
I also drive more than 50 miles every work day, like the majority of males age 18-to something or other, if not the majority of Americans.
(Btw, if I were you, which, thank heavens, I'm not, I'd raise that trillion dollars by seizing the assets of each company that spills, say, Tar Sands oil all over the place. Or just seize the assets of each oil company, really.)
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Be thankful I have no say in who gets the tesla series s...or you would get the first one.[Chants louder]
DIN-GO! DIN-GO! DIN-GO!
I already have a Lincoln Towncar, thank you, Master Dingo.
I also drive more than 50 miles every work day, like the majority of males age 18-to something or other, if not the majority of Americans.
(Btw, if I were you, which, thank heavens, I'm not, I'd raise that trillion dollars by seizing the assets of each company that spills, say, Tar Sands oil all over the place. Or just seize the assets of each oil company, really.)
Id have to be president to do that...
Which could only be if the United States granted citizenship to all of the world's denizens. Which, if I recall, was one of your earlier proposals.
Din-go! Din-go! Din-go!
EDIT: Nevermind, you're already on it, of course...