<snip>
>I understand you're a free-market proponent, so I'm sure you're dismayed by the distortion R&D tax treatment adds to the calculations. However, as I said, comparison to interest is the very least value. You're free to compare it to other R&D projects ;)

As a free-market capitalist I encourage pro-growth tax incentives.

>>>In business it's standard practice to calculate present and future values using market rates for the types of loans that would otherwise be needed to fund the expenditure, regardless of whether there is cash on hand or not. So, the comparison with mortgage amortization is valid and is something lurkers hopefully understand.
>>
>>I'd also like to object to your previous statement Anyone who's ever held a mortgage knows the monthly payments don't change that much when changing the amortization period from, say, 25 years to 35 years, let alone to 75 years.
>>
>>Using the default values from http://www.mortgagecalculator.org/ and just changing the loan term.
>>
>>Loan = $300,000, 5% fixed interest
>>10 year fixed, monthly payment = $2,964.14
>>15 year fixed, monthly payment = $2,289.48
>>20 year fixed, monthly payment = $1,962.39
>>30 year fixed, monthly payment = $1,654.55
>>50 year fixed, monthly payment = $1,447.85
>>
>>I've held a few mortgages and my experience is that the monthly payments can change dramatically based on both rate and term.
>
>I don't have the program I wrote for my old HP-29C calculator that calculates payments, you weren't limited to 50 year term. However, using that web site, and the numbers I specified:
>
>25 year term: 1,773.98 / month
>35 year term: 1,574.22 / month. A reduction of 11.2% for a term increase of 40%
>50 year term: 1,447.85 / month. Compared to 25 year term, a reduction of 18.4% for a term increase of 100%
>
>The optics of a 75 year term will be even worse :-/ No matter how you slice it, for long amortizations payments don't go down anywhere near as fast as intuition says they should. And that's using near-historically low interest rates.

and the numbers I specified What were those?