And how it figures into the mileage and payback equations. I don't know of a single rechargeable battery type that delivers 100% of it's performance for 2 years much less 5. Where's the predicted cost for the falloff in efficiency? And one other niggle. You have to lease a car like this for it to even make it compete financially. And only works short term. After 4-5 years I own my Focus, Cruz or other car outright. As long as I do maintenance on it it should deliver years of service beyond the 4-5 year payment window. How do these 2 fact skew the payback/affordability curve? And bear in mind we still haven't address the big "what if" out there. What IF the technology does mature sooner, rather than later. What IF they can make the affordable without subsidies and comparable to a gas car in true cost. What happens to the electric grid in all the urban places where there are likely to be large concentrations of these kinds of cars, all plugged in, all charging on a grid that is already stressed?

No.. No their aren't. It's in the Indiana state constitution. 1% for primary residences. Not only have they adjusted my taxes down for the last 5 years they also proactively adjusted my home value down. And Indiana has some of the fewest barriers to getting your home value adjusted. Try that in Illinois. After you hire your lawyer, fight for a year, get a hearing, have it appealed, drag that out for another year.. all the while paying the attorney.. In the end you Win!! $200 off your bi-annual tax bill. Until next year when they revalue your home and raise it again. And you may be fooling yourself about valuation. It's never coincided with purchase price and you should have known that going into purchasing a foreclosed property. It doesn't matter what you pay for a house. The property is appraised at whatever they deem it to be worth. What? You think they're going to let you open a LLC, buy a property, sell it to yourself for 20% and value your property tax on that? Still.. Being a transplant from Illinois I'm currently paying 1/3 the taxes on 3 times the house and 7 times the property as I was in Cook county Illinois. So whenever I see complaints about Indiana taxes I chuckle quietly to myself. It's all a matter of perspective.

As a good friends grandfather yelled at us when we questioned his lack of Turn signal use.. "IT'S NO ONE ELSES GODDAMN BUSINESS WHERE I'M GOING!!" Ah... the elderly..

We're all DOOOooOOooOoooooomed!! But for the low low low price of $9 trillion deposited to my account I can plant a tree every time you start your car and this will make it all better.. //filed under: The ridiculous proposition that the best course of action to deal with being stuck out in the rain is NOT to build a shelter but instead to stay there, getting wet, spending trillions, until you can figure out how to control nature and force it to stop raining on you.

With LED's, PV's (Which currently do not create more energy than used to make them when you factor in ALL costs and not just point of manufacture costs), Geothermal (which is the only viable green tech now), CFLs, LEED certified housing, LED monitors and TV's and everything else we STILL emit approx 24tons per cap. And do you know what a LED light adds to the conversion? At 10 times more efficient than an incandescent lightbulb you can now keep a SINGLE lightulb on for ten times longer. OH GOODY!!! No computers. No cell phones. No HOUSING. 2.2 tons per year. That's all your allowed. That is 2.2 tons and DROPPING. As the population increases that per capita number MUST drop to keep pace.. And that is to simply break even with predictions. Because.. After all. We're adding more CO2 than the planet can handle right? So we have to cut it back until we aren't adding any more. The point, utterly missed by you, is the futility and folly of claiming that we can reduce CO2 emissions to any meaningful level to change the atmospheric composition. Much like raising taxes on the rich to fix the deficit.. It's a great soundbite but utterly, mathematically meaningless against the scope of the perceived problem.

Well consider this.. The "estimates" vary wildly about tons of Co2 emissions for the United States.. Some rate in tons, some metric tons, some teragrams and some in units of measure that seem to have been created out of thin air to represent Co2 type damage.. But here's the jist.. In the US in 2007 we emitted 7,150,100,000 metric tons of Co2, which is 23.7 tons per capita. 2007 numbers.. Now.. They want to reduce our emissions to 1997 levels by 2020 and then an additional 80% by 2050. Keep in mind.. they're talking about TOTAL emissions.. Not per cap. If you have 1 person emitting 10 tons per year and reduce that number by 50%.. but then ADD 2 more people per yea the net change is 5 MORE tons per year.. You need to reduce the total amount of emissions to stop global warming. Nothing else will do. What does that mean? Lets look at how the numbers play out.. So 1997 levels by 2020.. According to the census bureau the population will be 341,386,665.. And in 1997 we emitted 4,900,000,000 metric tons.. So the goal is to reduce our emissions to 14.3 tons per cap.. When was the last time our emissions were at 14.3 tons per capita? That was back in the early '40's. According to Earthtrends Co2 presentation the per capita Co2 emissions per US citizen was 16 tons. And then reduce our emissions 80% of the 1997 levels by 2050.. More math there.. soo.. 980,000,000 tons for 439,010,253 people.. or.. 2.2 tons per capita.. When was the last time we were at that level? That was in the mid 1800's or right around the START of the industrial revolution. Well lets look at today's standard of living shall we? 2.2 tons per capita puts us right about the levels of Pakistan and Nigeria and the rest of the undeveloped regions of Africa.. 2.2 metric tons per cap. We exhale .33 tons per year. So the simple act of breathing takes us down to 1.9 tons per year.. Drive a Prius? Gas electric hybrid.. OOps.. No can do.. A Prius driven 15,000 miles per year emits 4.0 tons of Co2.. So you can't do that. Want to burn that 60w light bulb? Well if your energy comes from coal, as most global energy does, that works out to 1.78lb of Co2 per hour.. If you make the mistake of having that one 60w light bulb on every day that's 7 tons of Co2 and some change.. DOH!! No light for you what don't come from the sun.. So without doing anything else to meet that 2.2 tons per cap we will be able to breathe and have a single light bulb on for 4 hrs per day (1.1 tons per year) and that will give us .8 tons of Co2 to use for EVERYTHING else we do in life. Hope you don't need food or water, have to go to work, or do anything else ever.. To wrap all this nonsense up.. We've been at 20-ish metric tons per capita since the 60's. And with the absolute boom in electronics and electronic saturation of our population, more people than ever having cars and even multiple vehicles instead of one vehicle per family, larger homes, Cell phones and all the associated towers and switches, and everything else.. Consider what we have today vs. the 60's.. TV's per home, radios, cars, phones, computers, laptops, wireless communication, DVD players, rentals, dining out and fast food, everything that's different between now and the 60's and then remember to ADD all the associated equipment.. Manufacturing, transportation, equipment and services which all use power to make them work.. All the electricity that goes into making a single DVD and getting it to your house BEFORE you ever power on your DVD player and tv to watch it.. With ALL of that in mind remember that we've only increased our per capita output from 20 tons to 24 tons. And now.. they want us to get down to 14 tons in 10 years.. then 30 years after that down to TWO tons per capita. Now. We all know that won't be possible. But what should interest us is that there will be fines and taxes for not meeting those goals.. And that money will go to the government of our country and then be shipped off to "developing nations" to assist them.. But you won't have to pay that tax if you remember that you can purchase "offsets" from people like AlGore to help you.. Getting the picture yet?

$300 bn from "defense" would mean slashing the military in half. Unless you were to gut the FBI, CIA, TSA (Again.. I'm all on board with that), the VA, etc etc etc.. However $300bn still leaves $1.2 trillion in Deficit to deal with. And that's just this year. Entitlement spending is looking to equal the entire GDP of this nation in a very short amount of time. It is utterly impossible to cope with that through growth or taxation. Asking how much money a government gets to confiscate from the People and the Private sector and making the claim that a larger number is better is a fallacious statement. Tax revenue as a percentage of GDP is a poor measure. A well balanced, efficient, Government that operates well can be financed with 10% of GDP. Or even 5%. Depending on what the demands are. A government that is less involved can better serve the people when they need it by providing capital, loans and resources. Government, by any measure, is the largest waste of money, the most inefficient at spending it, and gets the worst returns on any investment. Which is why the place of Government is only and should be limited by law, only to that which the Private sector cannot adequately or reasonably supply. The only 2 things that come immediately to mind are Defense and Space Exploration.

It doesn't solve the problem at all or come anywhere close to it. However to address the first claim.. http://thinkprogress.org/security/2011/08/05/289395/u-s-defense-expenditures-dwarf-china-iran-north-korea/ Per that article the US only spends 6 times more than a handful of countries combined. And according to this article http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-spending the US spends less than 1/2 of the rest of the world combined. And Alternet has it's usual smear pieces saying that Defnse spending is actually $1 trillion. But if you go here http://investmentwatchblog.com/us-spends-more-money-on-defense-than-the-next-17-countries-combined/ they say that the US only spends as much as the next 17 countries combined. But as a percentage of GDP.. The US ranks 3rd on that specific list. And lets not forget.. Those Defense costs INCLUDE the spending on all 4 wars we're in. And if you go here http://www.wallstats.com/blog/total-military-and-national-security-spending-in-the-us-federal-budget/ you can see a breakdown of what exactly entails "Defense" spending. So what goes into Military spending? Are you going to cut the VA? Vet benefits? Vet health care? Enlisted salaries? The FBI?, TSA? (YES PLEASE), Border Security? ICE? CIA? "Defense" does not mean Army/Navy/Air Force/Marines only.. This is NOT to say that there isn't waste or room to cut. Merely that nothing substantial will be gained from it. And to the rest. You didn't list any numbers as to exactly how much you planned to rake in with those taxes and whom would pay them. Remember.. Almost 50% of the country has no tax liability at all. And neither they, nor those who rely on their votes, will allow them to be taxed in any appreciable way. Also consider your tax increase plan. Right now the top 25% already pay between 86 and 87% of ALL the taxes. The earning breakpoint to be IN the top 25% is a family AGI of only $67,000. Which means that a family with 2 working parents making $33,500 each should be subject to an 8% increase in income taxation. Now.. I know you said 20%.. But the readily available charting goes from 10% to 25%.. And the break point to get into the top 10% is $110 for a family. So there's only about $40k difference between the top 10% and top 25%. Meaning one doesn't have to move very high up the chain in family income to get from the top 25% to the top 20%. But still.. For your plan to work out it means that, in order to spend as much as people do and pay your taxes, incomes for everyone will have to rise by your stated amount (13%). eg.. If I have $100 to spend on video games and, with taxes, I buy 5 games at $20.. If your tax increases go through I now only have $92 to spend. In addition the games, with taxes plus your 5% VAT, now cost $21.. I only buy 4 games at $88 and maybe buy some pop or something with the remainder. What the VAT does, as every tax does, is take money out of the private sector. That's 1 game developer that didn't sell a product where he normally would. And trickle the effects up and down the supply chain.. You've also reduced the GDP of the country by 13% (8% income plus 5% VAT).. A real world example would be the gas prices/taxes here in the US. With higher gas prices states are losing money on gas taxes. Consider $.05 per gallon tax and a family with a fuel budget of $100. At $1 per gallon the family buys and uses 100 gallons of gas.. The state collects $5 in taxes. Gas prices double. The family spends $100, gets and uses 50 gallons. The state collects $2.50. The state sees their decrease (which they have and is one reason they're considering a GPS based per mile tax) in taxes.. So they say.. "Well crap.. We need more money. Double the gas tax to collect that extra. So they do. the family can now buy less gas. But it's not a zero sum game. Instead of using the full 50 or even 45 gallons the family may decide that they have to cut out almost all extraneous/pleasure driving and only use their cars for work. So they only buy 30 gallons. The state collects $3. But it goes further than that. The family has now cut out extraneous/pleasure driving. Less maintenance on the cars and roads. Less trips to restaraunts. Fewer visits to the local arcade or mini golf business. Fewer movies watched. (etc etc etc) Less money earned for the people who rely on those industries, and more importantly.. even LESS tax collected on the salaries and sales that would otherwise be generated by those activities. Which is why the Laffer curve works. Take the reverse of the game scenario. for sake of argument. Lower taxes, both income and sales.. $100 becomes $110, $20 game becomes a $15.50.. $108.50 buys 7 games instead of 5. Run it up.. More developers make more money. More people are needed up the chain, more salaries to tax. More consumption to tax. But still. You didn't provide the numbers. You made a broad based assumption that won't hold up. Taxation isn't a zero sum game. It doesn't just magically make money. It has to come from somewhere. Which is why this debate gets lost in politics. It's easy to say "Well all we have to do is..", "Evil corporate jet owners..", "Rotten rich people..".. etc etc.. When it comes time to put the rubber to the pavement and get NUMBERS it all falls apart.

Based on data just released by the IRS How many Millionaires are out there? Millionaire defined as a person or family earning more than $1,000,000 per year.. People and households earning $1 million or more annually made up just 0.1 percent, or just over 235,000, of the 140 million tax returns filed in 2009, and just 8,274 returns were filed by people making $10 million or more. So then.. 235,000 people/families making $1 million or more and only 8,274 people/families making $10m or more. Lets tax them more and solve ALL our problems!! How does that work out mathematically? The Fed collects = if we raise their taxes by $X $235,000 = 1 $2,350,000 = 10 $23,500,000 = 100 $235,000,000 = 1,000 $2,350,000,000 = 10,000 $23,500,000,000 = 100,000 $235,000,000,000 = 1,000,000 So.. if we take EVERYTHING from the people making $1 million per year, almost everything of the majority of the rest and an extra 10% of the remaining 8,000 or so people the Government will collect a staggering $235 billion. So then.. We only need to find another $1,200 BILLION more to cover the deficit ALONE.. Not taking into account the future growth of spending. But that's not fair.. only 10% from the 8000 making over $10 million!! Well then.. Let's take an additional $4,000,000 from them making it 50% of their wealth.. $32bn Extra!! WOOHOO!! $267bn total!! We're still $1.1 TRILLION short. For the DEFICIT alone. We haven't even touched paying for Obamacare yet. We haven't even touched the fact that SS and Medicare will be completely bankrupt in 20-30 years.. We haven't touched the baseline accounting that guarantees increases in spending for every single Government entity. So. Since it's mathematically impossible to generate enough revenue through tax increases on the rich.. No matter how severe.. Why do it? It's like trying to balance a household budget by cutting your $0.50 weekly gum allowance out. Tax the businesses as well!! I looked that up too. According to the Forbes list of most profitable companies.. If you confiscated 100% of their profits of the top 2-300 US companies you'd end up with another $500bn or so. Lets be very generous though.. We'll call it $700 bn for the sake of Argument. So. $267 from the tax increase on the rich.. and $700 bn from the tax increase on corporations. ALMOST $1tn. We're still $400-$500bn short.. For now. That doesn't take into account the massive increases that are coming. And you can only take ti all once. So by taking everything from the corporations and everything to nearly everything from the rich you've managed to come within a half trillion of cutting out the deficit.. for this year alone. So.. Solving this through taxation is mathematically IMPOSSIBLE. Say it with me. MATHEMATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE. So now what? What do we do? What choices do we make? A balanced approach of taxation and cuts? Remember.. The only way we got to our high numbers of revenue through taxation was to take EVERYTHING or nearly everything. You can't do that. Ever. You can't even do ½ of that. But lets say that you can. The country pulls together (meaning the rich and corporations pay more while the almost 50% who pay nothing continue to pay nothing) and we get $450 bn in new revenue. That leave $1 trillion in cuts.. PER YEAR. Not 10 years. Not 5 years. You must cut $1 TRILLION dollars today. Right now. This very second. And then you need to freeze spending where it's at. Not 1 more dime in increased expenditures. Not 1 dime in growth. Not 1 dime in increased SS/Medicaid/Medicare spending. At that point and time we're living paycheck to paycheck. A water heater failure away from disaster. I NEED for someone to explain to me how this is sustainable. How it's just a matter of squeezing a few more dollars out of businesses and the rich.

It's a poor test. First there is no way to verify the integrity of the Bel-Air. 2nd. The Bel-Air had an "X frame".. Which has far less strength in any direction than a ladder frame. This car was chosen specifically because they knew it's design would allow it to fail this specific test. Try this same test with a '76 Electra 225. Or a Lincoln Mark 3. Or allow for the new Chevy to be subjected to a side impact test by a 71 Caddy. Physics is a cruel mother. Which is why the other video's of the mid sized cars hitting the ultra compacts is so damning. In one video a mid sized Merc literally punts a smart car.. which goes completely airborne, spinning off to the side. Now imagine if they had done those tests with Full sized SUV's and the mico's.. That's not to say that there haven't been improvements in safety.. Merely that you can only do so much to overcome physics. My 5 year old daughter has "her" car.. We bought it for her when she was born. Now both she and my 3 year old daughter have joint ownership. It's the only car they ride in. A 2006 Expedition. 15mpg is the price I pay for safety.

And who pays for the new cars? The family that just paid off their Expedition to cart around their 3 kids and gear and values their safety would then turn around and buy a ... what exactly? And since you've increased the cost of fuel substantially.. Who's going to buy their old Expedition? Now make this a lower middle class family with a 1995 Caprice Classic wagon with 250k miles that they've been keeping running? Any consumption tax is going to have a greater effect on the poor and middle class.

And how would you like your $12 White Castle hamburgers? Or your $2000 'budget' PC's? Or perhaps simply $10 gal milk, $5 lb for tomatoes or even the $4 box of Kraft Mac and Cheese? $100 to mail a package to the next state? The price of Gasoline affects far more than just the cost of one's commute.