The House Always Wins
teslamotors.com
teslamotors.com
Is it even necessary for him to respond to petty accusations such as the inflated claims that he's masterminding Nevada's politics? Wouldn't it benefit him more to let the nay-sayers nay say?
Furthermore, while I think describing why the deal is a good idea is reasonable, that whole lead-off with "haha they're gamblers, you think Tesla could pull a fast one on them?" is kind of strange. It's basically an appeal to authority, where the "authority" is people who oversee the gambling industry, and the claim is that because casinos are really good at not being tricked, then their overseers (i.e. the Nevada legislature) must be even better. Except it doesn't work like that, the casinos are not gambling with the state, or trying to pull a fast one on the state at all. And the Nevada legislature doesn't directly oversee the casinos anyway; they simply tax them. It's the Nevada Gaming Commission that does the actual regulation of the casinos.
Basically, that second paragraph is just a combination of multiple rhetorical fallacies intended to imply that it's preposterous to claim that Tesla could ever get the Nevada legislature to agree to a bad deal. And for any readers who recognize this, it only serves to weaken the rest of the blog post. If that entire paragraph (and the single word "Moreover" from the start of the next paragraph) were to be deleted from the post, the post would make just as much sense and would have a stronger, more focused point. And it would also make Elon look better by virtue of being willing to just state the facts and let them speak for themselves.
(Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8610781)
If the 1.25B tax break causes a net gain in tax receipts due to the expansion of the economy, then the deal is a net positive for everyone, job-seekers, Nevada, and Tesla.
No one loses when the economic pie gets bigger. Economics is not zero-sum.
You are correct when you say economics was not zero-sum, and according to some people the government is too big, but that wasn't what your claim was about.
gph's reply to you was reasonable, and you made no counter. It's a pretty obviously a difference of opinion (and politics), and reasonable points were made in either direction.
So now two months later, you paint a picture wherein you've been vindicated - using the proof that Elon Musk says that the deal Elon Musk made is good for everyone.
What was he going to say; the ink's dry on our signatures now, Nevada, so I can admit I totally screwed you over and there's nothing you can do about it? Come on.
Maybe you are right, maybe not, but no new information has come to light since the last discussion, and claiming victory based on a press release is intellectually dishonest.
I am replying to you, because there is something I can add. My explanation of why I avoid replies. Take it as you want.
How can this be? Tesla Motors was founded in 2003. Did they take over the plant from some other manufacturer?
The joint GM / Toyota project started in 1984: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI
And the GM Fremont Assembly plant opened in 1962:
If I paid $1 for something and today's market price is $10 then I got a bad deal if I sell it for $5, even though I made a profit.
That depends on the circumstances. If you paid $1 for something, and someone else went in on the deal with you for 50% of the revenue if it went up but 100% of the loss if it failed, then selling it for $5 for you and $5 for the person shouldering the risk is not a bad deal for you at all.
As long as money will buy political power, the little guy will always lose this game.
Get money out of politics if you want to change anything. Separation of Money and State.
of course. Anybody is entitled to whatever break/deal he can get. It is just that government is [in the naive theory of "we the people"] exactly there to keep the playing field level/fair, to not allow big players to tilt it in their favor.
I don't blame Nevada for engaging in it, and I think they probably won overall.
Other factors (cheap land, regulatory, etc) almost definitely came into play but nobody is really complaining about those.
http://www.sohonet.com/our-global-reach/
That said, I'd wager you could ask people around the world, and they'd still say "Hollywood", though plenty of folk are, I'd imagine, aware of Vancouver's popularity for doubling as many US cities, Pinewood Studios, and WETA.
I wouldn't worry about it, Americans are notorious for saying "world" when they mean "country", because they're usually not thinking about anything or anyone outside their borders.
You write like someone who has not been to Las Vegas, Nevada as recently as I have. When you write something like that, I wonder where you have been in the world. I was in Las Vegas for the first time since the 1980s just more than a year ago, to meet up with high school classmates of my wife--who attended high school in Taiwan. The classmates we met were not the only Chinese-speaking visitors we encountered who had just flown across the Pacific to be in Las Vegas, not by far.
I actually don't have a particular place in mind as I read the phrase "entertainment capital of the world," but I'm not sure I would say off-hand that there is any place that outranks one city or another in the United States for that designation. The United States is, after all, second only to France in the number of international tourist visitors it receives each year, and at least some of the tourists who come here come for entertainment of one kind or another. Many consumers of mass media entertainment in other parts of the world consume quite a lot of entertainment that is produced in the United States (although not so much that is produced in Nevada, methinks, as contrasted with California or New York).
In the context of the article kindly submitted here to open the thread, it is clear that Musk could have written "gaming capital of the world" (that's the Nevada way of saying it) or "legalized gambling capital of the world" (that's how I'd say it, to be clear what kind of "gaming" is being written about), and then he would have been both more coherent with the point he was making and less likely to cause topic drift like the topic drift found in the subthread here. His argument is that a state that regulates a lot of gambling knows how to bet wisely in its state regulations.
AFTER EDIT: Hat tip to the other participant in this same subthread who pointed out that Las Vegas uses the term "entertainment capital of the world" as a promotional slogan.[1] But people outside Las Vegas refer to Los Angeles with that designation.[2]
[1] http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/may/15/evolution-worlds...
[2] http://www.todayszaman.com/travel_los-angeles-entertainment-...
In any case, it doesn't matter. As you say, of course Musk's point was that Nevada has a lot of experience regulating the gambling industry, which is undeniably true.
I've lived for more than 7 years each in Australia and Canada and 2 years in the USA (east and west coast). I've lived more than 4 months in Ecuador and Argentina and I spent 1-2 months passing through every country from Alaska to Argentina (I drove). I've been to Japan, Hong Kong and Fiji for a month each.
I've been to Vegas 4 times, most recently in May 2014.
This is probably the lamest ad hominem attempt I've seen on this site.
I'm genuinely curious.
Musk didn't just invent that slogan, it's what Vegas uses. And that's very likely where he borrowed it.
Is it true? Even if it's not, Vegas isn't wildly off the mark. It's one of the top entertainment capitals in the world.
Also what about surrounding infrastructure like roads, sewage, etc. Who is paying for that?
Or build it in another country and people could scream at them for being unpatriotic.
>> Also, if the deal is good with Tesla, why not give similar deals to every company that wants to put up a building?
You are arguing for lower taxes. This is a noble goal, but much harder to achieve than such deal. As Bismarck said, politics is the art of the possible. It's not ideal, but given current situation it's also not the worst outcome.
>> In the end states will just forego corporate taxes altogether and get all their revenue from the people.
Corporate taxes are about 10% of budget income, despite US corporate tax rates being one of the highest in the world. So it's neither unprecedented not unimaginable to have lower corporate tax rates. As for the people, corporations are ultimately owned by people, so it's still tax on people, just certain kind of people - doing business in the US. Every dollar taken as corporate tax is not paid as dividend, not invested in hiring another worker, not spent on buying supplies or services. So ultimately it's people all the way down.
Sure it is, just not spent by the corporation. The government will spend it - they can't seem to help themselves. The only thing taxes change is who gets to control where the money goes.
One can just as easily say "tax corporate revenue" and not paychecks, since it's allegedly circular with money going back and forth between people and companies (people all the way down). I'm not advocating this of course, but we're living in a time when your assertions about profit going to hiring, supplies, and services are clearly false. It happens, but it's certainly not a given.
>>> The only thing taxes change is who gets to control where the money goes.
Not entirely. The government usually proves to have quite inefficient with how it spends revenues. Sometimes it is necessary - i.e., feeding the destitute produces no money, but has a humanitarian value. Sometimes, it is not - like spending billions on bridges to nowhere and crony projects that collapse the minute government financing is withdrawn. So we also have to consider the destruction of value that the government involvement usually brings about. Of course, corporations can destroy value too - but usually can't survive for very long once they started to do it unless they manage to stop. For the government, it has to be extraordinarily destructive to collapse, for a company, the bar is much lower.
>>> your assertions about profit going to hiring, supplies, and services are clearly false. It happens, but it's certainly not a given.
Err, I'm not sure where your "clearly false" comes from. Is it clear to you that corporations do not spend money on hiring, supplies and services? How they then manage to have people show up to work and suppliers to give them supplies and services, if they don't pay for it? Also, if some fairyland corporation ever managed to pull off such impossible trick, it still wouldn't change a thing, as that would only mean entire revenue goes to the corporation owners - i.e., again, "people".