Agreed. I’ve learned a lot here, and not just about the Lightning. As long as everyone keeps it reasonably polite and at least somewhat on topic, I’m all for learning about different points of view, even if they’re miles away from my own.
My main problem with all of this is the lack of humility or lack of room for other opinions in many of these posts. You are not John Locke, Socrates, Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson- you are not going to write the next Magna Carta. Most everyone is simply parroting some bullcrap they read on the Internet or something that some polarizing talking head said or wrote over the past few days. “Government IS X” and “government IS Y”. It all smacks of the crap we are all spoonfed in order to continue to divide this country. Maybe government helps some people, did you ever think about that? There are externalities, like climate change, the government has a very important role in helping to prevent because the changes are so slow, they aren’t built into the current marketplace. Personally, I like the free market and capitalism. I also like open mindedness and discourse, and, yes, I like when the federal government ends segregation, helps to protect gay people and takes action on climate change. I can’t stand where we are as a country, though, backed up into our corners, in our Unabomber huts. I have done away with my Twitter and Facebook accounts. It all brings out the worst in us, including me. We need to get together, not apart as a country or we’re all f*cked.
LOL. This made me think of that old song by Paul Simon (A Simple Desultory Philippic), I’m probably dating myself here:
Wow, this is a bold and in my view anyway, intelligent move. I’ve never had FB or Twitter—I save most of my irrelevant drivel for coffee and truck forums—but I think the brainworm-causing damage of those platforms has started to outweigh their positive usefulness.
I agree with most of your comments, but it helps no one to fail to claim the credit - if you take delivery of the truck during the credit availability period or the phase-out period, then that credit is lost to the world forever, it does not fall to the next person in line. With respect to moral consistency and clarity - it is not immoral to believe a tax provision is wrong or even immoral and to still implement it in one personal tax strategy. As Ayn Rand said whil collecting Social Security, as system that she personally opposed, "It is precisely because I view welfare programs like Social Security as legalized plunder, that I think the only condition under which it is moral to collect Social Security is if one regards it as restitution and opposes all forms of welfare statism." (emphasis hers). The seeming contradiction that only the opponent of Social Security (or EV tax credits, etc.) has the moral right to collect it dissolves, she argues, once you recognize the crucial difference between the voluntary and the coerced.
Dude, this is a thread specifically about tax credits.
Actually, we do not get to define what government should be . The U.S. Constitution does that. We may amend the constitution, but absent that we must operate within its constraints. I understand and actually teach exactly your points as counterpoints to my own views, which I suppress when in educator mode. However, I would point out that the programs you mention are recent, and that the national debt levels accompanying them are unprecedented. MMT (Modern Monetary Theory - put forth by Elizabeth Warren's and Bernie Sanders' economic advisors) is being posited as a panacea to justify continued deficit spending into what some of us economists see as oblivion, and others see as socialist nirvana. No one can be certain, but I do not believe the laws of basic economics have been repealed - that we are on seriously borrowed time - that the spending levels we are seeing now are beyond anything in history - and that we stand the potential to see something akin to the Weimar Republic in very short order. The Fed and the Biden admin are waking up to their mistakes earlier this year when denying that their spending and easy money actions would create inflation. Many of us, including some on the left like Larry Summers, clearly saw it coming, and now that it is playing out as surely as gravity causes planes to land, they have to put on the brakes - they are getting it, which is why even inside the White House, the fervor for BBB has quickly cooled. They are blaming others, with Manchin as a chief whipping boy, but it isn't just one or two Senators controlling this as the media would have us believe - it is 52 to 48. BBB was always a bad idea, but with the recent understanding that the inflation ratchet is already out of hand, fueling it further would be insane.
Wouldn't letting that $7500 vaporize help stem inflation and prevent further growth of the national debt? I realize it's a small amount of money relative to the macroeconomic winds that are moving us, but we all have to do our part.
If the gub’mint don’t spend the fake money on EV credits they certainly won’t save it ?.
I agree…. I also don’t care for the Child Tax Credit, they too should be charged a Carbon Tax. After all that’s were it all starts, every child born will carry with them for the rest of their life a Carbon footprint. Say $600 per year until age 21.I don’t think EV tax credits should exist. I also don’t think ICE vehicles should continue to receive subsidies in the form of free use of the atmosphere to dispose of waste.
A combustion waste disposal fee (a.k.a. carbon tax) to the tune of $200/tonne CO2 ($1.67/gallon) would level the field.
