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I would argue it is possible to believe both that Tesla is a great company and that Romney was generally right in that many of the green investments have indeed

by temphn 14y ago

I would argue it is possible to believe both that Tesla is a great company and that Romney was generally right in that many of the green investments have indeed been losers (Solyndra, A123, Beacon Power, Abound Solar, ...). Lest we forget, Romney is/was a pretty great investor and entrepreneur himself, just like Elon Musk. It's unfortunate that Romney included Tesla in his list of green losers - he did start this fight - but Tesla is the exception that proves the rule. The government has not come close to making money on its green energy bets, and will not even if Tesla is a massive success. It has lost $535M on Solyndra, $249M on A123, and $400M on Abound Solar. Even if Tesla is profitable enough to pay back its $465M loan, this is a very poor risk-adjusted return. Many of the other companies in the green energy portfolio are reportedly quite sick as well; we shall see what happens to the 26 that received loan guarantees in five years. The dismal history of Russian and Chinese state-owned enterprises should be sufficient to give us pause, but the reasons that people oppose government funding of companies like this are several fold: 1. The government has the power to regulate or tax competitors into submission. Regulators have strong political incentives to begin colluding with funded companies at the expense of the consumer to show that the investment was a "success". This can be done without fingerprints by doing things like holding competitors to a higher bar when applying for permits. 2. Unlike the funds pledged by an LP, tax dollars are extracted coercively (via threat of police action for failing to pay the IRS). Arguably such acts should be kept to a bare minimum. 3. The federal government is notoriously poor at being on the cutting edge of technology; it is unlikely that they will make better investment decisions than professional investors. One can go further, but it is striking to see how companies like Uber or AirBnB run into political roadblocks, while other companies receive $500M loans. The government is not just any old company or investor, the government has guns and can compel action in a way that others cannot. As such it is very powerful to have as a investor and very dangerous to have as a competitor. Too dangerous.

s_baby 14y ago
With a small handful of high payoff winners, it's tax money well spent.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- temphn 14y ago
  Romney founded Bain; I think most would argue that makes him an entrepreneur, no? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bain_Capital#1984_founding_and_early_history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bain_Capital#1984_founding_and_... Regarding the clean energy investments, I think we will both see qualitative aspects of this differently. I don't think you dispute that $90B was spent on green energy, and there were several very high profile busts; similarly I don't dispute that most of those companies are still going concerns, or many of the points in that link.
Jach 14y ago
I've heard two lines of reasoning used to justify those and similar expenses: 1. The government, which can be considered as a sovereign corporation, has a moral obligation to run at a loss because certain ventures are "inherently unprofitable" 2. If Tesla is a big success, the tax revenues from the increased capital in the market (directly from Tesla itself but also all the things it influences) will pay for the losses in the loans to other companies. I don't particularly fancy Argument 1, but do you think Argument 2 holds any water? If Tesla pays back their loan and the others you mentioned are total washes, it's "only" about $1bn, what do you think about how hard is it realistically to make that back? Tesla already has a multi-billion dollar market cap and is looking to grow.
- temphn 14y ago
  Well, so, I'm an empiricist on this. Absolutely one can point to companies like Tesla (or defense contractors in an earlier time) which received a ton of government money and by any objective measure did push technology forward. But one can also point to companies like Google which received only $25M in venture funding and certainly went on to create ridiculous amounts of wealth by any measure. And I believe this is the ecosystem argument you're getting at, if I'm not mistaken? So now it becomes a quantitative question. Economics is notoriously resistant to controlled experiments, but I think that in the main the experience of the 20th century has showed us that you want to have most wealth allocated by the market. If you look at all Eastern Bloc nations, the Soviet Union, North Korea, pre-Deng China, pre-reform Vietnam, and so on down the list...and then compare them to West Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, you've got a pretty good case for less government intervention in the market. The few countries that do government/tech investments reasonably well are pretty small countries like Singapore run by technically savvy guys, and there too the government is keenly aware of the fact that it needs to treat companies well or they will leave. So, for what it's worth, regarding this point: the tax revenues from the increased capital in the market (directly from Tesla itself but also all the things it influences) Basically if the idea is that government involvement can create a favorable ecosystem, I think that an even more favorable ecosystem is one where the government just hangs back and lets the market punch it out ("laissez-nous faire"). Some companies will die and won't get bailouts. Some companies will look like they're on the ropes and then make an incredible comeback. But no company will be able to call in the government, the guy with the gun. Then it's not a fair fight anymore, and (extending the analogy) you scramble to get out of the ring/country because you can't win. Put it this way: when the ref has bet $500M on your competitor, there is no point in playing.
ikono 14y ago
I don't really think you can evaluate government loans the same way you would as a private investor. The federal government has defacto senior equity in every company that is incorporated and/or operates in the US. As a private investor the only upside you get from a loan is the interest. It's not even entirely fair to use a VC type model here as the government will also reap rewards from companies that indirectly benefit from these investments. Your points regarding state-owned companies is more a case against equity investment and a defense of the loan model. The US government isn't going to go to extreme measures to recoup a billion dollars and because it doesn't have any additional equity there's no other real incentive to prop up the companies that it has loaned money to. The free market is an extremely powerful system that is capable of remarkable things but it's not perfect and there are problems that the free market won't address on it's own (climate change being a poster boy example).
- temphn 14y ago
  I don't really think you can evaluate government loans the same way you would as a private investor. So, there are different ways to isolate a core philosophical disagreement but I think this may be one of them. In a different context you will hear people say that "the government is not a household" because the USG can print money. OK, so call that one point of view. Another point of view looks at the largest and most successful companies (like Apple, Google, et alia) and compares them to the smallest countries (like Iceland). Interestingly, you can do the math to see that Iceland gets about $5.6B of tax revenue with a population of 320,000, while Apple makes $156B with an employee base of about 73,000. This indicates that Apple is about 120X more efficient in terms of dollars generated per person; indeed, significantly more so in that tax payments are more on the involuntary side while Apple purchases are more on the voluntary side. You can extend the same kind of analysis to Fortune 500 companies and many small countries. This is a very interesting exercise because no one disputes that the Fortune 500 companies can be evaluated by private investors, or that the countries have flags, fiscal policies, and the like. And yet the former outperform the latter by a lot on metrics like this. So, that's the point of view that says that governments should be evaluated in the same way you'd evaluate companies. One not-so-bad way to think of it is that a citizen is buying a huge package of goods from the government, like cable bundling on steroids, and can only switch service providers by moving. But, in any case, because we disagree on that point we'll probably also disagree on others. For example, the senior equity thing...are you stating the USG can exercise eminent domain and/or nationalize a company at will? I agree that in practice they have done this, but I at least don't believe this is a good thing. Anyway, yeah, that's the crux of it: one group does not believe governments should be judged like companies, another group believes they should. Hopefully you can at least see our point of view even if you don't decide to convert :)
jbooth 14y ago
I don't think Romney was necessarily giving his honest opinion on Tesla. He was running for president and environmentalists = hippie communists, so of course he's going to publicly hate on Tesla. Comparing strategic DOE loans in energy to Stalin and Mao is going a bit far, btw.
- temphn 14y ago
  Hmmm. Russian state-owned enterprises did not end with Stalin, and Chinese state-owned enterprises did not end with Mao. Many of them continue through to the present day and are not setting the world on fire. I should note that I agree that Romney probably did not know much about Tesla besides the name. But most politicians don't know much about technology. Last I looked, I believe we have only one scientist in the entire House of Representatives (Rush Holt, D-NJ?).
  - saraid216 14y ago
    > But most politicians don't know much about technology. Last I looked, I believe we have only one scientist in the entire House of Representatives (Rush Holt, D-NJ?). I wish everyone who thought, "I wish people in office were more like me" actually ran for office. That's the best way to get people like you in office. Age requirement for the House is only 25.
    - jbooth 14y ago
      And money requirement is several million dollars, plus connections all over your district, in practice.
      - saraid216 14y ago
        How many people are in your district, why don't they think you're electable, and why can't they donate a dollar if they do?
        jbooth 14y ago
vidarh 14y ago
If these businesses were "safe" bets, there would be no need for the government to step in - the capital markets would queue up to provide. Government loans and subsidies like this only make sense exactly when they are for high risk ventures where what they provide may be very unlikely to provide a good direct return on the initial investment itself, but where the potential societal benefits in the long term can be great (e.g. improved environment, or kickstarting an entirely new market).
mpyne 14y ago
> The government is not just any old company or investor, the government has guns and can compel action in a way that others cannot. As such it is very powerful to have as a investor and very dangerous to have as a competitor. Too dangerous. I get what you're saying but I really wish people would quit bandying about the "government has guns" line. I'm one of the zillions working in the USG and I can tell you that the left hand doesn't hardly even know what the left finger is doing most of the time, let alone the right hand (and this is often by design, to avoid exactly what you're talking about). If you want to discuss hypotheticals of gov't gone astray then that's fine but then we could also discuss those hypothetical meteors that might hit your corporate HQ (hope you've been doing your disaster recovery planning). Or we could quit acting like starting a business in the U.S. is really just like starting a business in a country run by a junta, or that investing in civilian-run businesses that further a societal and national goal is just like establishing a command economy.
- temphn 14y ago
  Or we could quit acting like starting a business in the U.S. is really just like starting a business in a country run by a junta The US is obviously a much better place to start a business than a Latin American dictatorship. However, the question is whether it's a more stable environment than, say, Singapore. Here are a few links that I know weigh heavily on the minds of people who think like me; you might believe we should weigh them less, but these are governmental decisions that arguably do increase the unpredictability of doing business in the US. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2009/05/04/chryslers-holdout-lenders-object-to-sale/ http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2009/05/04/chryslers-holdout-len... In a long document filed Sunday evening, Chrysler asked a judge to approve a sale of most of its assets and some of its liabilities for $2 billion to an entity formed by Fiat, the United Auto Workers’ retirement trust and the United States and Canadian governments. But in Monday’s objection, a group of debt holders advised by the law firm White & Case criticized the proposal as too rushed, arguing that it was unreasonable to rule on the merits of the sale on “15 hours’ notice.” Moreover, they said the sale was really a reorganization plan in disguise — one that flouts the basic rules about which creditors get priority under the federal bankruptcy code. The proposed sale attempts to put social goals ahead of bankruptcy law, and should not be approved, the objection said. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_Pipeline#Keystone_XL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_Pipeline#Keystone_XL The Keystone XL extension was proposed in 2008.[6] The application was filed in September 2008 and the National Energy Board of Canada started hearings in September 2009. [16] On March 11, 2010 the Canadian National Energy Board approved the project.[2][3][17] The South Dakota Public Utilities Commission granted a permit on February 19, 2010. [18] On July 21, 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency said the draft environmental impact study for Keystone XL was inadequate and should be revised... http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/science/earth/14coal.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/science/earth/14coal.html?... The Environmental Protection Agency revoked the permit for one of the nation’s largest mountaintop-removal coal mining projects on Thursday, saying the mine would have done unacceptable damage to rivers, wildlife and communities in West Virginia. It was the first time the agency had rescinded a valid clean water permit for a coal mine... Environmentalists welcomed Thursday’s decision. But the mining company and politicians in West Virginia expressed fury, saying the action was an unprecedented federal intrusion, an economic catastrophe for the state and a dangerous precedent for all regulated industries. http://mobihealthnews.com/6932/interview-the-iphone-medical-app-denied-510k/ http://mobihealthnews.com/6932/interview-the-iphone-medical-... Did MIMvista ever make it into the AppStore? Mobile MIM was available at the launch of the App Store. The app was free and included sample patients for people to try it out for themselves. Why did MIMvista remove the app from the store? (or was it forced out?) In August of 2008, we submitted our first 510(k). ... To be honest, this dramatically new direction for our company, and the speed at which it occurred, left us ill- prepared for the scope of the regulatory process that would unfold. Within only a few weeks of submitting, we were contacted by the FDA and told that our app could not be on the app store (despite the fact that it was both free and labeled as “not intended for diagnostic use”) because it served as marketing for a device that was not cleared for marketing. We promptly removed it. Then, over the next few months, we discovered that our proposed device raised more questions than we had anticipated. In order to make their determination, the FDA wanted more information than we had provided. The process stalled out as we reviewed what we would have to do next. This 510(k) was declared not substantially equivalent (NSE) because of insufficient data. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/retail/story/2012-07-25/buckyballs-ban/56481316/1 http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/retail/story... The Consumer Product Safety Commission on Wednesday sued the maker of the popular magnetic desk toy Buckyballs to stop the sale of the product because of the risks posed to children... Responding to a request for comment, the company sent a press release headlined, "CPSC: Thank you for trying to drive a $50 million New York-based consumer product company out of business." Buckyballs and Buckycubes are Maxfield & Oberton's sole products; 2.5 million sets have been sold since 2009. One can go on in this vein. These stories did happen. You may or may not agree that they are happening at an increasing rate; you may or may not agree that this increase is statistically significant. But the perception is indeed that the US is becoming a much more unpredictable place to do business.
Gustomaximus 14y ago
In regard to loan value it is overly simple to only look at the value to government in getting loan repayment back. Think of the tax revenues they got from the employees, the industries built to support these companies etc. So even when Solyendra didnt pay back the loan the govt has probably seen a fair wack of money come back in other routes to offset the loan loss. And if Tesla succeeds they will see many billions flowing back in taxes from the company itself, employees and the industries that work with tesla. Much more than any amount loaned.

by temphn 14y ago

s_baby 14y ago

With a small handful of high payoff winners, it's tax money well spent.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

temphn 14y ago
Romney founded Bain; I think most would argue that makes him an entrepreneur, no? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bain_Capital#1984_founding_and_early_history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bain_Capital#1984_founding_and_... Regarding the clean energy investments, I think we will both see qualitative aspects of this differently. I don't think you dispute that $90B was spent on green energy, and there were several very high profile busts; similarly I don't dispute that most of those companies are still going concerns, or many of the points in that link.

Jach 14y ago

I've heard two lines of reasoning used to justify those and similar expenses: 1. The government, which can be considered as a sovereign corporation, has a moral obligation to run at a loss because certain ventures are "inherently unprofitable" 2. If Tesla is a big success, the tax revenues from the increased capital in the market (directly from Tesla itself but also all the things it influences) will pay for the losses in the loans to other companies. I don't particularly fancy Argument 1, but do you think Argument 2 holds any water? If Tesla pays back their loan and the others you mentioned are total washes, it's "only" about $1bn, what do you think about how hard is it realistically to make that back? Tesla already has a multi-billion dollar market cap and is looking to grow.

temphn 14y ago
Well, so, I'm an empiricist on this. Absolutely one can point to companies like Tesla (or defense contractors in an earlier time) which received a ton of government money and by any objective measure did push technology forward. But one can also point to companies like Google which received only $25M in venture funding and certainly went on to create ridiculous amounts of wealth by any measure. And I believe this is the ecosystem argument you're getting at, if I'm not mistaken? So now it becomes a quantitative question. Economics is notoriously resistant to controlled experiments, but I think that in the main the experience of the 20th century has showed us that you want to have most wealth allocated by the market. If you look at all Eastern Bloc nations, the Soviet Union, North Korea, pre-Deng China, pre-reform Vietnam, and so on down the list...and then compare them to West Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, you've got a pretty good case for less government intervention in the market. The few countries that do government/tech investments reasonably well are pretty small countries like Singapore run by technically savvy guys, and there too the government is keenly aware of the fact that it needs to treat companies well or they will leave. So, for what it's worth, regarding this point: the tax revenues from the increased capital in the market (directly from Tesla itself but also all the things it influences) Basically if the idea is that government involvement can create a favorable ecosystem, I think that an even more favorable ecosystem is one where the government just hangs back and lets the market punch it out ("laissez-nous faire"). Some companies will die and won't get bailouts. Some companies will look like they're on the ropes and then make an incredible comeback. But no company will be able to call in the government, the guy with the gun. Then it's not a fair fight anymore, and (extending the analogy) you scramble to get out of the ring/country because you can't win. Put it this way: when the ref has bet $500M on your competitor, there is no point in playing.

ikono 14y ago

I don't really think you can evaluate government loans the same way you would as a private investor. The federal government has defacto senior equity in every company that is incorporated and/or operates in the US. As a private investor the only upside you get from a loan is the interest. It's not even entirely fair to use a VC type model here as the government will also reap rewards from companies that indirectly benefit from these investments. Your points regarding state-owned companies is more a case against equity investment and a defense of the loan model. The US government isn't going to go to extreme measures to recoup a billion dollars and because it doesn't have any additional equity there's no other real incentive to prop up the companies that it has loaned money to. The free market is an extremely powerful system that is capable of remarkable things but it's not perfect and there are problems that the free market won't address on it's own (climate change being a poster boy example).

temphn 14y ago
I don't really think you can evaluate government loans the same way you would as a private investor. So, there are different ways to isolate a core philosophical disagreement but I think this may be one of them. In a different context you will hear people say that "the government is not a household" because the USG can print money. OK, so call that one point of view. Another point of view looks at the largest and most successful companies (like Apple, Google, et alia) and compares them to the smallest countries (like Iceland). Interestingly, you can do the math to see that Iceland gets about $5.6B of tax revenue with a population of 320,000, while Apple makes $156B with an employee base of about 73,000. This indicates that Apple is about 120X more efficient in terms of dollars generated per person; indeed, significantly more so in that tax payments are more on the involuntary side while Apple purchases are more on the voluntary side. You can extend the same kind of analysis to Fortune 500 companies and many small countries. This is a very interesting exercise because no one disputes that the Fortune 500 companies can be evaluated by private investors, or that the countries have flags, fiscal policies, and the like. And yet the former outperform the latter by a lot on metrics like this. So, that's the point of view that says that governments should be evaluated in the same way you'd evaluate companies. One not-so-bad way to think of it is that a citizen is buying a huge package of goods from the government, like cable bundling on steroids, and can only switch service providers by moving. But, in any case, because we disagree on that point we'll probably also disagree on others. For example, the senior equity thing...are you stating the USG can exercise eminent domain and/or nationalize a company at will? I agree that in practice they have done this, but I at least don't believe this is a good thing. Anyway, yeah, that's the crux of it: one group does not believe governments should be judged like companies, another group believes they should. Hopefully you can at least see our point of view even if you don't decide to convert :)

jbooth 14y ago

I don't think Romney was necessarily giving his honest opinion on Tesla. He was running for president and environmentalists = hippie communists, so of course he's going to publicly hate on Tesla. Comparing strategic DOE loans in energy to Stalin and Mao is going a bit far, btw.

temphn 14y ago
Hmmm. Russian state-owned enterprises did not end with Stalin, and Chinese state-owned enterprises did not end with Mao. Many of them continue through to the present day and are not setting the world on fire. I should note that I agree that Romney probably did not know much about Tesla besides the name. But most politicians don't know much about technology. Last I looked, I believe we have only one scientist in the entire House of Representatives (Rush Holt, D-NJ?).
- saraid216 14y ago
  > But most politicians don't know much about technology. Last I looked, I believe we have only one scientist in the entire House of Representatives (Rush Holt, D-NJ?). I wish everyone who thought, "I wish people in office were more like me" actually ran for office. That's the best way to get people like you in office. Age requirement for the House is only 25.
  - jbooth 14y ago
    And money requirement is several million dollars, plus connections all over your district, in practice.
    - saraid216 14y ago
      How many people are in your district, why don't they think you're electable, and why can't they donate a dollar if they do?
      - jbooth 14y ago

vidarh 14y ago

If these businesses were "safe" bets, there would be no need for the government to step in - the capital markets would queue up to provide. Government loans and subsidies like this only make sense exactly when they are for high risk ventures where what they provide may be very unlikely to provide a good direct return on the initial investment itself, but where the potential societal benefits in the long term can be great (e.g. improved environment, or kickstarting an entirely new market).

mpyne 14y ago

> The government is not just any old company or investor, the government has guns and can compel action in a way that others cannot. As such it is very powerful to have as a investor and very dangerous to have as a competitor. Too dangerous. I get what you're saying but I really wish people would quit bandying about the "government has guns" line. I'm one of the zillions working in the USG and I can tell you that the left hand doesn't hardly even know what the left finger is doing most of the time, let alone the right hand (and this is often by design, to avoid exactly what you're talking about). If you want to discuss hypotheticals of gov't gone astray then that's fine but then we could also discuss those hypothetical meteors that might hit your corporate HQ (hope you've been doing your disaster recovery planning). Or we could quit acting like starting a business in the U.S. is really just like starting a business in a country run by a junta, or that investing in civilian-run businesses that further a societal and national goal is just like establishing a command economy.

temphn 14y ago
Or we could quit acting like starting a business in the U.S. is really just like starting a business in a country run by a junta The US is obviously a much better place to start a business than a Latin American dictatorship. However, the question is whether it's a more stable environment than, say, Singapore. Here are a few links that I know weigh heavily on the minds of people who think like me; you might believe we should weigh them less, but these are governmental decisions that arguably do increase the unpredictability of doing business in the US. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2009/05/04/chryslers-holdout-lenders-object-to-sale/ http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2009/05/04/chryslers-holdout-len... In a long document filed Sunday evening, Chrysler asked a judge to approve a sale of most of its assets and some of its liabilities for $2 billion to an entity formed by Fiat, the United Auto Workers’ retirement trust and the United States and Canadian governments. But in Monday’s objection, a group of debt holders advised by the law firm White & Case criticized the proposal as too rushed, arguing that it was unreasonable to rule on the merits of the sale on “15 hours’ notice.” Moreover, they said the sale was really a reorganization plan in disguise — one that flouts the basic rules about which creditors get priority under the federal bankruptcy code. The proposed sale attempts to put social goals ahead of bankruptcy law, and should not be approved, the objection said. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_Pipeline#Keystone_XL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_Pipeline#Keystone_XL The Keystone XL extension was proposed in 2008.[6] The application was filed in September 2008 and the National Energy Board of Canada started hearings in September 2009. [16] On March 11, 2010 the Canadian National Energy Board approved the project.[2][3][17] The South Dakota Public Utilities Commission granted a permit on February 19, 2010. [18] On July 21, 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency said the draft environmental impact study for Keystone XL was inadequate and should be revised... http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/science/earth/14coal.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/science/earth/14coal.html?... The Environmental Protection Agency revoked the permit for one of the nation’s largest mountaintop-removal coal mining projects on Thursday, saying the mine would have done unacceptable damage to rivers, wildlife and communities in West Virginia. It was the first time the agency had rescinded a valid clean water permit for a coal mine... Environmentalists welcomed Thursday’s decision. But the mining company and politicians in West Virginia expressed fury, saying the action was an unprecedented federal intrusion, an economic catastrophe for the state and a dangerous precedent for all regulated industries. http://mobihealthnews.com/6932/interview-the-iphone-medical-app-denied-510k/ http://mobihealthnews.com/6932/interview-the-iphone-medical-... Did MIMvista ever make it into the AppStore? Mobile MIM was available at the launch of the App Store. The app was free and included sample patients for people to try it out for themselves. Why did MIMvista remove the app from the store? (or was it forced out?) In August of 2008, we submitted our first 510(k). ... To be honest, this dramatically new direction for our company, and the speed at which it occurred, left us ill- prepared for the scope of the regulatory process that would unfold. Within only a few weeks of submitting, we were contacted by the FDA and told that our app could not be on the app store (despite the fact that it was both free and labeled as “not intended for diagnostic use”) because it served as marketing for a device that was not cleared for marketing. We promptly removed it. Then, over the next few months, we discovered that our proposed device raised more questions than we had anticipated. In order to make their determination, the FDA wanted more information than we had provided. The process stalled out as we reviewed what we would have to do next. This 510(k) was declared not substantially equivalent (NSE) because of insufficient data. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/retail/story/2012-07-25/buckyballs-ban/56481316/1 http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/retail/story... The Consumer Product Safety Commission on Wednesday sued the maker of the popular magnetic desk toy Buckyballs to stop the sale of the product because of the risks posed to children... Responding to a request for comment, the company sent a press release headlined, "CPSC: Thank you for trying to drive a $50 million New York-based consumer product company out of business." Buckyballs and Buckycubes are Maxfield & Oberton's sole products; 2.5 million sets have been sold since 2009. One can go on in this vein. These stories did happen. You may or may not agree that they are happening at an increasing rate; you may or may not agree that this increase is statistically significant. But the perception is indeed that the US is becoming a much more unpredictable place to do business.

Gustomaximus 14y ago

In regard to loan value it is overly simple to only look at the value to government in getting loan repayment back. Think of the tax revenues they got from the employees, the industries built to support these companies etc. So even when Solyendra didnt pay back the loan the govt has probably seen a fair wack of money come back in other routes to offset the loan loss. And if Tesla succeeds they will see many billions flowing back in taxes from the company itself, employees and the industries that work with tesla. Much more than any amount loaned.