For someone named "The Pi Guy," you're not very good at mathematics.
1) There are not 300,000,000 people paying taxes in the United States. Unless you think that 4-year-olds are paying taxes or something.
According to this from 2016, in 2014 there were ~139,600,000 people paying taxes in the United States
2) Why assuming 500,000 cars? Just to make the numbers work for you? What if all 139,000,000 people wanted to buy a car? Heck, what if each of them wanted to buy 2 cars?
You're basically just making up numbers to fit what looks good.
And that's even without touching your "California is more likely than other states to push things to help lower income people" assertion, which is basically just fantasy. Especially given your idea of having every person in the country contributing just to help California.
1.) It's the average per person. Of course the average is ultimately offset by most people not paying taxes. That's generally how averages work.
For example, if I were to say people on average are sick once a year, would you find it "bad math" to exclude the people that weren't sick?
With the current federal tax subsidies for electric cars, the average person spends about 12$ for this initiative. This means the average family of 4, spends 48$, family of 6 spends 72$.
Putting in the average terms is much meaningful because it is much easier to calculate the rate for a 4 person family or an X person family.
The fact that some people don't pay taxes and others pay quite a bit in taxes, ultimately means that the analysis gets much more complicated for determining how much a particular individual gives to these subsidies.
Not to mention, other forms of tax such as sales taxes, which makes it even more difficult to assess.
Sure, it's missing a lot in it's analysis. All I was really trying to do was give a reasonable estimate for the impact that this has. Theres tons of math dedicated to giving estimates, when computing the reality is too costly.
But sure, bad math.
2.) Because that's how many electric cars have been sold in the US total. Unless you are expecting a ~106,800% increase (compared to the last year) in electric cars, for some reason.
I never said that other states would be helping California.
Basically if 10 people buy 1 electric car, then expecting 100 people to buy 10 electric cars is not unreasonable.
Basically California has a smaller population to buy cars, so they are likely to buy less cars.
There aren't 139 million in California to buy cars.
The rates under California's proposal will probably be a doubling of what the federal is. So, if the average US citizen is paying 12$ towards the subsidy, the average California citizen is paying closer to 25$ (this is of course dependent on how aggressive they end up being). Could even be much higher, especially if more people start buying electric cars like they are expected to.
That 12$ is total, spread out over the past several years. It would have been around 3$ on average last year.
It's impossible to make actual estimates of how much this would cost the average CA citizen, (let alone taxpayer) because we don't know how big the subsidies will be quite yet, and how much it would affect car sales.