{{ A Fiat dealership in Colorado is turning heads by offering a 27-month lease on a 2024 Fiat 500e for $0 per month and no down payment. }}
It’s the “free Obamacare” of driving. {{ LOL }}
https://www.axios.com/2024/12/17/fiat-taxes-colorado-electric-vehicle
Also in the news. Trump to go after EV tax credits “very bigly”.
intercst
Yep - a quirk of the various changes to the EV credits, which allow cars that wouldn’t qualify for credits if sold to a consumer to get them if leased. That’s available as an upfront point-of-sale credit to the dealer, AIUI.
So if the dealer can get the full $7.5K from the federal credit, and if this qualifies for the CO state credit of $5.0K (which can also be taken upfront, AIUI), then you’ve got $12.5K to the dealer at time of signing. On a short-term lease of 27 months, that works out to $460 per month. Which is…pretty close to what a lease would yield on a $30K car like the 500e?
And we see how subsidies distort the marketplace…
DB2
Saw another article where a Colorado woman purchased a used Nissan Leaf for less than $700 after various credits.
intercst
Did she thank her fellow Americans, present and future, for the gift?
The Captain
No doubt she offered the same thanks we’ve received for borrowing trillions of dollars to fund our billionaire oligarchs’ tax cuts.
intercst
This statement assumes that taxing is fair game. The Spanish word for “tax” is 'impuesto," imposition in English. Why is taxing good and reducing taxing bad? Maybe what needs to be reduced are the useless things tax money is wasted on. Bridges to nowhere?
When you tax billionaire oligarchs, money that ends up invested in business goes to pay for bridges to nowhere. How is that an economic improvement? Just a different oligarch getting the money. And the middle man/woman/android getting his/her/its cut.
The Captain
Absolutely not! Taxing hasn’t been a fair game since 1980 when we started letting the wealthy go tax-free while raising taxes on working people.
Once I figured that out, I retired early. If I can create a middle-class income by doing a couple of hours of tax planning and portfolio rebalancing at year end, there’s no way you’re going to see me sitting in an office for 40+ hours/week.
intercst
arithmetic will set you free.
Absolutely! How much do you think you’d be paying for gasoline if we didn’t spend tens of billions of dollar every year to keep things semi-quiet in the Middle East?
We’ve looked at this before. The Middle East produces about 30 million barrels per day of oil, which translates into about 10 billion barrels per year. Roughly 550 billion gallons. So if we pay a few tens of billions per year to keep things semi-quiet in the Middle East, that would translate into maybe an extra nickel on the cost of a gallon of gas.
There are other subsidies, other expenses, other impacts. But direct military outlays in the Middle East by the U.S. are relatively small when allocated across the volume of oil they produce.
Imposition comes from the 14th century Old French word of the same spelling, meaning “the levying of taxes, a tax, duty.”
Taxes have been viewed as impositions for probably as long as they’ve been around.
Bahahaha. My coffee came out my nose.
Come on. Seriously? What used to be true investing in the business during the olden days has mutated into executive compensation and share buybacks.
“1980 when we started letting the wealthy go tax-free while raising taxes on working people.”
your posts from years ago really opened my eyes to how the tax system really works. In my working-class eyes, income is income, and should all be taxed the same. In the tax code built by the lobbyist’s for the wealthy, capital gains and dividend income are treated much more favorably. And there are no FICA taxes on CG’s and dividend income. W2 income
is treated much harsher, there really is no argument that I’ve ever seen that can refute that.
So a couple of people have made out like bandits on EV purchases. The wealthy are quick to proclaim foul. But they make out like bandits on the tax code, and of course have no problem at all with that.
You have left out the $10 trillion we’ve spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention all the other things we’ve gotten ourselves into as a direct result of our penchant for oil. So bump your estimate by a factor of, oh I don’t know, 10x?
If we didn’t have troops in Saudi Arabia, the Twin Towers are still standing. What’s that worth?
PS: A barrel of oil produces less than a barrel of gasoline. Less than half a barrel actually. So let’s make sure the math is mathing, here.
Require the each oligarch to spend his/her/their entire lifetime on that “bridge to nowhere”. I guarantee that bridge WILL GO SOMEWHERE !!!
Probably not. Total direct costs on the Iraq war were about $1.1 trillion, give or take, even if you were to attribute 100 % of the costs to “securing oil flows” instead of any other national security objective. Our operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan didn’t provide any direct protection to oil flows, so I’m not sure we would attribute any of those costs to oil - but let’s even if we took about half of that $2.3 trillion, it would come out to a little over $2 trillion over twenty years. Rounding to make the math work, you would only get an extra twenty cents a gallon - and I think that’s a massive overallocation. Maybe a dime? Even that’s too high, I think.
Sure, but you would allocate the costs of protecting the oil to all the other products of the barrel of oil as well. Some charge to diesel, some charge to jet fuel, some charge to heating oil, etc. So if it’s fifteen cents of expense per gallon of crude oil, you’d have fifteen cents per gallon of product.
The question is how much we’d be paying for gas if we didn’t spend the money.
The sticky wicket is that all that money we spend to keep the lid on things isn’t nearly enough.
When Iraq invaded Kuwait, the price of oil jumped from around $15 to $40 per barrel and gasoline went up by 50% in the US. This triggered a recession which lowered US GDP by 1.5%. If that happened today, it would translate to roughly $400 billion in lost economic activity.
1973-1975 and 1980-1982 recessions were also caused by oil shocks. The Great Recession was exacerbated by an oil shock.
Our economy is completely dependent on oil. And before you can say “drill baby drill” oil is a fungible commodity and a disruption anywhere in the world causes prices to spike everywhere in the world.
This is madness. The only economically defensible position is to transition away from an oil-based economy as soon as reasonably practical.
This is a big, difficult job. But endless wars in the Middle East are big difficult jobs too.
That doesn’t necessarily follow. Oil is a relatively inexpensive source of energy for the uses to which it is put - even moreso during the time period you’re talking about, when it was almost the only practical fuel for cars and trucks and planes.
So it is entirely possible (and I would submit likely) that the economic advantage to using all that oil outweighed the direct costs you mention. The costs of economic shocks are high - but that’s not guarantee that they’re higher than the costs associated with trying to “transition away from an oil-based economy.” You might be right that both wars in the Middle East and transitioning away from an oil-based economy are both big difficult jobs - but that in no way guarantees that the former is a bigger job than the latter.
I would surmise that wars are likely easier and cheaper (as well as more politically feasible) than forced adoption of alternatives.
Not posting in support of such, just observing that it is likely true.
What if instead of “forced” it is accomplished over time via limited subsidies and policies that slowly move the country towards easier adoption of said alternatives?
I think one of the biggest political problems in the world is that too many people think that changes, big charges like the one we are discussing, have to happen instantly or very quickly. Meanwhile history has shown us that big changes usually happen over a relatively long period of time. It’s probably that whole instant gratification thing spread across a society.
And yet, there is so much resistance to the idea of the transition to BEVs or even smaller more fuel efficient ICE cars. The use of plastic for everything is way up and lots of recycled plastic is not actually recycled. No one can be bothered to take reusable bags to the store and get (usually) one time use plastic bags.
The list goes on and on
This is madness
Mike
