Let's just take a second and be pedantic. The government is not currently actually printing money. It's not creating currency. It *is* creating debt. It's an important distinction because the two are different. As long as someone is buying the debt and thinks that the "investment" is sound, then there should be no problem. The long term ramifications of all this debt on the world market... that's another topic.
Arguably, the loan on topic, to Tesla, doesn't have anything to do with economic stimulus relating to our current predicament. In other words, these loans would have been available even if the economy was doing OK (if Tesla needed them.) This about policies relating to alternate fuels, call it "green", call it oil independence, call it the future... whatever.
I'm also in agreement with you that I would rather see the funds for such purposes go to a different sort of program. I illustrated that in my previous post. But my point in this post is to delineate the concepts of a gov't loan to Tesla vs the gov't printing money and giving it to Tesla. The two are very different.
My call to, take advantage of the free money being "printed by the gov't" was partially in jest for two reasons. One, they're not printing money... and two, the real point was, anyone in a position to take advantage of similar gov't programs would be doing so rather than complaining about it. Tesla seems to be in that position.
I still can't buy a similar vehicle to anything Tesla offers for any price. That's worth something to at least 500 people. If the figures are correct, and the Sedan comes in at an effective $35,000, it will certainly be attractive to a larger audience, and it will be pretty amazing. The average price of a new car these days is about $28,000. Do I think they can do it? I have a healthy skepticism. But I've heard of Tesla's destruction via implosion so often now. They have 500 Roadsters delivered when naysayers claimed it would never happen. That's not to say it implosion couldn't still happen, but at least they've got product on the floor.
The fact is, we need cars like this on the market to stimulate competition. The more there are, the cheaper it gets.
At the end of the day... oil prices will rise, consumers will flock to more fuel efficient offerings and the technology will either be there or it won't. I, for one, hope it will.
What would you say about a company like Aptera?
Now maybe I wouldn't blame anyone for thinking that a loan means never having to pay it back given what's happened over the past couple of years... That's terribly sad...
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Originally Posted by Cardinal
Economics 101 concerns taking advantage of the gov't printing money. It doesn't do anyone any good. Look at pre-WW2 Germany.
I think that coming up with better sources of electricity would be a better use of $465m, if the alternative was giving it to Tesla. I'm not on the CO2 enviro-doom chicken little bandwagon, but rather I'm sick of relying on mideast oil. I believe we will live to see it run out.
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