$400B is moderate? Have there been other bills that have come anywhere close?

It's only 20% of what Musk thinks he can cut from the government expenses.

This doesn't seem like a terribly relevant metric. See for example this critique:

https://jabberwocking.com/elon-musk-knows-nothing-about-gove...

It is impossible to cut government expenses as much as Musk claims. It was akin to Trump claiming he would replace the ACA with something better or that Mexico would pay for the wall.

"The secret plan I'm hiding behind my back" is not a plan at all.

Did I say moderate? I should have said small. Remember this is $400B over a 10-year period, i.e. $40B per year. The US federal budget is $6.1T per year, so not even 1% of the annual budget.

It is also small in terms of the extent of expenditure needed for such a conversion of the US energy production system. A cost estimate from 2019 suggested somewhere between $4.5T - $5.7T over the whole period:

* https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/cost-of...

* https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/renewable-us-gr...

so $400B - even if we could assume that all goes directly to achieving the goal, which it does not - is under 10%:

Where'd you get 10 years? I'm seeing "through September 2026" for the deployment of those funds. Also, it's taken them a bit to get back up to speed, since the political fallout around Solyndra basically caused them to go defunct for a decade, they've had to hire a lot of people to get back up to speed to be able to process loans.

Also, you can't look at the entire budget, entitlements like Medicare and Social Security dwarf everything else, you need to look at the discretionary part.

Funny how easy it is to trivialize spending other people’s money

Almost as easy as polluting other people's air.

Anyway, I would say that "La propriete, c'est le vol" [1], so not much sentiment for the taxed. It _is_ a problem that US tax burden lies mostly on workers and very little of it on the rich and the larger corporations.

[1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_propriété,_c'est_le_vol_!

The top 10% of earners pay ~75% of income tax in the US, income taxes at least are pretty progressive, especially when you include the standard deduction. Maybe you mean the people who live off of investments rather than high earners? But you should consider that their effective tax rate is the corp tax rate plus cap gains/dividend rate.

Anyway, to your earlier point, I’m very much in favor of more resources into fighting climate change than what has been put into it, but I don’t think that what is needed is anywhere near what is considered acceptable by most, and given that, I’m quite happy with what this administration was able to put forth. Of course it’s a compromise.

Bottom line: I take back the claim that very little lies on the corporations and the rich; I should say very little (in relative and absolute terms) lies on corporations and not enough (in absolute terms) on the rich.

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1. The fact you cited is weird to me, since the top tax brackets in the US are pretty close together, and overall, rather low:

https://www.irs.gov/filing/federal-income-tax-rates-and-brac...

but - I guess I should have accounted for the skewed distribution of income in the US... for the top 10% to pay 75% of income tax, let's do some cocktail-napkin math to see how bad this is.

So, if we have a flat tax rate, this situation would mean that the top 10% make 3x more in total than the bottom 90%, or, 27x more per capita.

Assuming the average tax rate on the bottom 90% is, say, 12%, and on the top 10% is 36%, that would mean the average income in the top decile is 9x higher than in the average in the other 9 deciles. According to this:

https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/

the average and median for the bottom 90% should be about similar, meaning that the average (not median) top-decile person makes 9 x $45,000/annum = $405,000/annum. The median top-decile person makes $201,000/annum, or about 4.5x than the median person on the bottom 90%. If we were to compare with the median person over the entire population - the median top-decile person makes 4x as much as the median person overall. Ouch.

2. I was naively interpreting this:

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/gover...

i.e. that individual income tax accounts for 51% of US federal income, while corporate income/earnings tax accounts for 4%. I mistakenly assumed that the vast majority of workers pay the majority of taxes.

I wonder, though, how that chart accounts for Capital Gains tax.

Right, it's mostly because of the large skew in incomes, and I agree that that's not a great situation. It's kind of why I scoff when people say that you can't get Americans to do farm labor for any price. I'm pretty sure you can, just not while maintaining the huge purchasing power that white collar workers have gotten for themselves, and they really don't seem to like thinking about that scenario, preferring to just pretend that it's impossible.

But yeah, specialist doctors and white shoe lawyers can pull down 10-20x that median, so they're paying a lot of income tax. The standard deduction really dings the effective tax rate of that median earner, not so much for the doctor.

> Anyway, I would say that "La propriete, c'est le vol" [1], so not much sentiment for the taxed.

Classic, “fuck the middle class carrying the societal tax burden, hur hur”.

The people that pollute are not the ones stuck with the tax burden. Your incentives are completely misaligned here which means costs bloat and problems don’t get solved.