Saturday, August 25, 2012

a) Sell it, b) Buy a Honda Nighthawk, c) Pocket the Remainder

What would be my answer to the question, "So, what would you do if somebody gave you a free Chevy Volt?"

16 comments:

Jerry Critter said...

Why?

Will "take no prisoners" Hart said...

What would you rather have, Jerry, a Honda Nighthawk and a pocket-full of Benjamins, or an ugly overpriced car that you have to plug in?

Jerry Critter said...

Since it is free, I would rather have the volt.

Will "take no prisoners" Hart said...

But I sold it for $35,000 (or whatever the ridiculous price of it is).

Rusty Shackelford said...



There is no such thing as a free "Volt." G.M. owe's the tax payers 24 billion that we will never see.Or is it the UAW who owes the dough....whatever.

Les Carpenter said...

??????????

Will "take no prisoners" Hart said...

And don't forget, either, fellas, those $7-8,000 rebates that the rest of us had to subsidize.

dmarks said...

Yes as Rusty reveals, the federal handout to GM involves a handout of tens of billions that will never be 'paid back'.WD earlier said it was all paid back. I think this is another example, like his insistence that Bain Capital outsourced more than Immelt, where he just made up something on the fly.

Will "take no prisoners" Hart said...

Another unintended consequence of these tax breaks for electric vehicles was the fact that a hole bunch of rich people ended up getting brand new golf carts for essentially nothing....And they say that only Republicans are pro-rich.

dmarks said...

Will: And this reminds me of another extreme: the greedy destructive "luxury taxes" of the 1990s era, put in place to appease the savage "class warfare" brutes who feed off lowbrow appeals to jealousy.

The taxes didn't harm the rich at all. They just discouraged the rich from spending their money on boats. The only noticable result of the tax was a lot of firings of blue collar workers who made boats and other such things that the tax told people not to buy.

"Boating industry leaders have blamed the 10 percent tax on boats priced above $100,000 for costing billions of dollars in lost sales and tens of thousands of jobs between 1990 and 1993, when it was in effect." from The Baltimore Sun.

Misplaced priorities and terrible public policies have major consequences. But I guess none of those who favored this policy (and there was major resistance from Democrats on repealing it) are working stiffs who build boats, nor did they give a damn about them.

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There's a happy medium here: no special taxes on vehicles (or anything, for that matter) and no tax breaks, either. Let everything sell for as close to the real value as possible.

BB-Idaho said...

"The taxes didn't harm the rich at all. They just discouraged the rich from spending their money on boats"
...thought that was Donald Trump
I saw rowing that dinghy.

dmarks said...

And while Donald rowed, the blue collar middle class families were sunk.

Will "take no prisoners" Hart said...

I remember that one well. It did some serious damage in Rhode Island.

The Prophet Dervish Z Sanders said...

dmarks: ...like his insistence that Bain Capital outsourced more than Immelt...

I never "insisted" this. You're flat out lying.

BB-Idaho said...

My heart bleeds for those who couldn't afford the 10% yacht
tax, but what about the Federal
10% tax on pistols/revolvers?..
the tax on cigars which went from
8.8% in 1990 to 52.75% these days.
Now there's some serious taxation.

dmarks said...

BB: The rich could afford the tax. But they found it easier to do what the government policy was doing: discouraging them from buying these products.

WD: I have directly quoted your short, exact, and specific statement in which you did say that Romney's Bain outsourced more than Immelt. Want me to do it again? For the umpteenth time?