Thursday, October 4, 2012

Wasting Money on Federal Subsidies

I dont have TV so I did not see any of the debate last night but have seen plenty of reaction to Mitt Romney's comments on how we wasted money on various green tech firms namely Solyndra and Tesla.

He thinks its a waste of money to support a business that is "a loser" and ultimately Tesla may end up failing but will the US have lost?  if so, what would they have lost? a few hundred million dollars? ok, ya that is a lot to you and me what is that worth to America as a whole?   After all we have Billion dollar programs that could easily be considered to be failures; The highway fund, Social Security, Education program, Medicare, Social Security, the list goes on and on. None of these programs would have survived in the private sector and they dont survive now unless we continuously infuse massive amounts of cash to keep them going.

But Tesla has given the country value even if they shutter their doors today.  They have proven that a great electric vehicle can be built and they did it with only a fraction of the money available to established auto manufacturers.  Now the book is still open on the Model S and the Roadster did have a few hiccups, delays and mis-steps in its day as well but considering the odds; Tesla has done extremely well and we should have a fairly decent idea of how the S will work by this time next year.

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