Remember the Solyndra "Scandal"? Those Loans Are Now Making Money For American Taxpayers

a reply to: mc_squared
Thank you for the response!

originally posted by: Aazadan
a reply to: SubTruth

I love the free market and all but you need some government involvement. Otherwise how do we compete with countries like China which use businesses backed by the government to develop products? Private investors only have so much money to throw around.

We currently do not have a free market........it has been many,many years since we did. It is all a lie, we are so far off the path we do not even know what the path looks like anymore.



Young occupy minded people listen to what I am about to say.........If we truly followed the constitution corporate oligarchies could not and would not exist in the US.


You mention China........It will fall apart within 10 years unless it changes. Progressive utopias in the past have always failed. Look at Nazi Germany..... Hitler was the leader of a Union......Think I am crazy look up what the NSDAP stood for. They gained and retained power as the champion of the people. Gas chambers were actually first used on any none providing citizen. If you could not work into the chamber you went. This is what progressives leaders at the top have done in the past. Hitler took great inspiration from the early progressive movement started in the US .

a reply to: SubTruth

We currently do not have a free market........it has been many,many years since we did. It is all a lie, we are so far off the path we do not even know what the path looks like anymore.

We never did, especially if your definition of a free market is broken if government invests tax dollars in private enterprise... namely, risky innovation. How do you suppose ships were built? Coal mining? Metals mining? Railroads? Oil wells? Oil refinement? Telephone infrastructure? Sewer pipes? Water pipes? Gas pipes? Electrical lines?

Young occupy minded people listen to what I am about to say.........If we truly followed the constitution corporate oligarchies could not and would not exist in the US.

It used to be that Corporations required charters (permission) from the town or city they were setting up in. If the people felt it was good for them, they approved and if it turned out later that it wasn't so good for the area that charter could be revoked. We need to go back to that. Not this idiotic notion that Tea Partiers/faux libertarians have that 'job creators' should get everything they want with no regulation and no taxes... that is what lead us down the path of Plutocracy.

You mention China........It will fall apart within 10 years unless it changes. Progressive utopias in the past have always failed. Look at Nazi Germany..... Hitler was the leader of a Union

That is absurd. China smashes unions. Hitler smashed unions. These are not progressive utopias, put down the Alex Jones kool-aid.

Modern nation most closely living out the theories of "free markets" and "smaller/no government": Somalia.

Do you want to live in Somalia? I personally do not.

I'll take our mixed economy and democratic republic any day of the week.

a reply to: SubTruth

Giving taxpayer money to private companies should be illegal. If the government just stayed out of the picture and did what they are supposed to do the economy would be great. Companies would sell goods and people would buy them.

Governments have always encouraged the development of technologies and industries. It is one of the fundamental purposes of government. It is EXACTLY what 'they are supposed to do' for the economy - EXACTLY.

source

Along with the development of the atomic bomb, the digging of the Panama Canal, and landing the first men on the moon, the construction of a transcontinental railroad was one of the United States' greatest technological achievements. Railroad track had to be laid over 2,000 miles of rugged terrain, including mountains of solid granite.

Before the transcontinental railroad was completed, travel overland by stagecoach cost $1,000, took five or six months, and involved crossing rugged mountains and arid desert. The alternatives were to travel by sea around the tip of South America, a distance of 18,000 miles; or to cross the Isthmus of Panama, then travel north by ship to California. Each route took months and was dangerous and expensive. The transcontinental railroad would make it possible to complete the trip in five days at a cost of $150 for a first-class sleeper.

The first spikes were driven in 1863, in the midst of the Civil War. Two companies competed to lay as much track as possible. The Central Pacific built east from Sacramento, Calif., while the Union Pacific built west from Omaha, Neb. The government gave the companies rights of way of 200 feet on each side of the track and financial aid of $16,000 to $48,000 for each mile of track laid.

The government support for the transcontinental railroad amounted to between $880million and 2.6 billion (2014 dollars) in mileage support alone. Add to that the land grants for cities along the way that were sold off for settlers - surely many billions of dollars worth.

The 'real' purpose of the moon landing wasn't to land a man on the moon, or even get to the moon before the Russians - it was specifically to develop the technology that would enable us to put a man on the moon and the industries to exploit it. You are reading this forum on one of the fruits of that government support. The telephone network, the electricity grid, airplane development, interstate highway system, etc, etc, etc, all built with government support. That is what Obama meant when he told a group of business people that 'they didn't build that': he meant that the people of the United States built that through Government support.

When the Bush era Congress passed the bill they KNEW FULL WELL that not every loan would pay off, and that is the price to pay for pushing technology - not every piece of technology works or survives competition with other technologies.

The Solyndra loan was not a bad loan, it was a Government investment in technology development. The Solyndra technology was good, being much more efficient that conventional crystalline silicon, and quite capable of being successfully commercialized which it was on the cusp of doing. The project was not killed by bad technology, government interference, or mismanagement. The project was killed by market forces that changed the economic circumstances that gave Solyndra an advantage - specifically the plunging cost of silicon; nothing more, nothing less.

That technology will turn up somewhere somehow, being used for something unexpected at this time.

a reply to: xuenchen

I'll have to find some examples of Presidents sending bills to Congress.

Then I'll get back to ya.

The President sends bills to Congress for approval all the time. Then the Congress holds hearings, debates them, changes them, negotiates back and forth, amends them, and sometimes even votes on them (unless the President is black of course) to approve or disapprove them.

Obvious example: the President submits a budget bill every year. EVERY YEAR the President submits a budget bill. A budget bill is submitted to the Congress every year. Get it? Congress might ignore it and pass its own without reference to the President, but usually Congress negotiates with the President to achieve a mutually satisfactory final bill.

Budgets are not the only example of course. In the State of the Union Address, the President usually lays out the structure of his plan for the next year; then he follows that up with bills that will enable him to carry out that plan. Usually (unless the President is black of course) the Congress enters into good faith negotiations over those bills. Sometimes the President gets what he/she wants, and sometimes he/she doesn't.

You really shouldn't speak in absolutes before you understand the process in some sort of rudimentary way because your ignorance betrays any credibility your opinion might have.