Comment Re:Just another cautionary tale (Score 5, Informative) 164
For perspective, the tax breaks given to oil companies amounts to about $2.4 billion/year (in the form tax breaks which are similar to the same tax breaks that every other industry gets for investing in expansion). Loan guarantees like the one A123 got totalled $90 billion in the "stimulus" bill passed in 2009.
Where's this $90 billion number from? $88 billion over ten years was the total for titles II, IV, V, and VIII of the ARRA bill. Loan guarantees are only part of this.
Wikipedia puts the total green-energy loan guarantees at $6 billion. There might be some other loan guarantees hiding in other categories, but your total is suspect, and comparing an annual number to a ten-year number is deceptive regardless.