Comment by kunle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kunle | Hacker News Reader

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Tesla takes advantage of a lot of these things, but that sort of rent-seeking is so par for the course, that choosing to NOT take advantage of it would put any company of scale at a massive disadvantage relative to their peers. A short laundry list of the industries that do this very well: financial firms, energy firms (both production and delivery), car companies (who can forget GM and Chrysler in 08/09), sports teams/leagues (particularly when building stadiums/facilities, and others. The subsidies/tax breaks etc that they take advantage of are at the Federal, State, and Local level, sometimes international, and oftentimes playing different government entities against each other to get better deals.

The New York Times had a fantastic article on this: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/us/how-local-taxpayers-ban...

And a visualization here with some data: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/12/01/us/government-...

Re-reading it, makes you wonder how profitable all these industries would be without all these subsidies/tax breaks etc baked in.

Last I checked, and it's been a few years, the entire wind power industry exists only because of tax credits - their financial structure is designed pretty much entirely around them. Take them away, and there are no new wind farms, which is interesting, because part of the reason that costs are high for wind farms is the scarcity of turbines. The turbines are scarce because the GE's of the world do not want to invest long term capital in an industry propped up by government subsidies... and round and round it goes.

Point about the wind power industry is entirely correct - my goal was simply to put it in context. Many companies (including GE as you mention) are only so profitable by taking advantage of a multitude of tax credits/subsidies and the like.

Reference: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/business/economy/25tax.htm...

Several of GE's businesses are propped up by government subsidies. All I'm saying is that GE is not really different - Tesla simply happens to be in a sector that's particularly high profile and politically charged, and its claiming of those things are out in the open.

That doesn't answer my question, and I specifically said I wasn't implying anything political with my statement.

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